VI. THE ENGLISH RACE HORSE (Continued)
England supplied with horses before the Christian era—Bred for different purposes—Markham on the speed of early native horses—Duke of Newcastle on Arabians—His choice of blood to propagate—Size of early English horses—Difficulties about pedigrees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Early accumulations very trashy—The Galloways and Irish Hobbies—Discrepancies in size—The old saddle stock—The pacers wiped out—Partial revision of the English Stud Book.
Britain was fully supplied with horses when first invaded by the Romans, but as there is no history beyond that period we are only groping in the dark when we attempt to discover when or whence this supply was procured. The most reasonable theory is that the first supply came from the Phœnician merchants, when they were trading for tin in the southwestern part of Britain. If this theory be correct, the trading between the Phœnicians and the Britons could hardly have been later than the fourth century before the Christian era, and it is more probable that it was several centuries earlier. This topic, however, has been considered in a preceding chapter. Another theory is that when the tides of migration struck the Atlantic, in the higher latitudes, there was a natural deflection toward the warmer countries of the south, the people carrying their horses with them. But from the primitive condition of the arts and of maritime affairs among the Norsemen of that very early period, and from the insular position of Britain, it seems to me that to reach it with horses, the most probable source of supply was from that great nation whose “ships of Tarshish” had been trading to all lands more than a thousand years before the Christian era. But, laying all theories aside, there are some facts and dates that we know, and the particular one to which I wish here to call attention is the historical record that when the Romans first visited Britain they found an abundant supply of horses; and this was about four hundred years before Arabia received her supply from the Emperor Constantius.
From the time of the Romans in Britain, horse-racing has been a popular and favorite amusement of our ancestors, and from that time horses have been bred for special purposes. The “Great Horse,” as he was called, was bred for war, parade, and show, and was large enough and strong enough to carry a knight in armor. The smaller horses were bred for the race or the chase, others for the saddle on account of their easy, gliding motion, and the comfort of the rider, while others, again, were stout of back and limb and able to carry burdens. In regard to the speed of the horses bred for that purpose, Mr. Gervase Markham, the second Englishman who undertook to write a book on the horse, has given us some very interesting and valuable information. He brought out his work in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and it passed through several “enlarged and improved” editions. In the edition of 1606 he says:
“For swiftness what nation has brought forth the horse which excelled the English? When the best Barbaries that ever were in their prime, I saw them overcome by a black Hobbie, of Salisbury, and yet that black Hobbie was overcome by a horse called Valentine, which Valentine neither in hunting nor running was ever equalled, yet was a plain English horse, both by syre and dam.”
From this we must conclude that some horses from the Barbary States had been brought over previous to 1606, which doubtless antedated the arrival of King James’ Arabian. This is the horse known as the Markham Arabian, and is in the above list of foundation stallions. In speaking of the Arabian horses as a breed, the Duke of Newcastle remarks as follows upon this particular representative of that breed:
“I never saw but one of these horses, which Mr. John Markham, a merchant, brought over and said he was a right Arabian. He was a bay, but a little horse, and no rarity for shape, for I have seen many English horses far finer. Mr. Markham sold him to King James for five hundred pounds, and being trained up for a course (race), when he came to run every horse beat him.”
The duke then goes on to speak of the staying qualities of the Arabians:
“They talk they will ride fourscore miles in a day and never draw the bridle. When I was young I could have bought a nag for ten pounds that would have done as much very easily.”
These remarks are repeated here because they are specially pertinent in this connection.
It will be conceded by every one who has any knowledge of the horse history of this period that the Duke of Newcastle was the best-informed man of his generation on all subjects connected with the history and breeding of the horse. His preference for blood was in the following order: The Barb, the Turk, the Spaniard, the Neapolitan, and the handsomest of the English stock. It will be observed that in this classification the Arabian has no place.
From these illustrations, to which other similar ones might be added, it seems to be evident that the native English stock did not lack speed so much as they lacked quality, finish, and beauty. Perhaps size should be included in this enumeration. They had been bred and trained to run for centuries, and they were as stout and fleet as the exotics, but they lacked the qualifications of beauty and style. The foreigners possessed what the natives lacked, and more than all they furnished both the climatic and the blood outcross that were needed to re-invigorate the native character. It was the custom of the people in the seventeenth century to let their horses of both sexes roam at will through forests and glades, and in this way the average size had been reduced and the law of Henry VIII. (prohibiting the running at large of stallions under a certain size) had become a nullity. At the time of the restoration of Charles II. (1660) the average size of the traveling stock of England was very small—perhaps not over thirteen hands high—and then commenced the serious work of increasing the size and improving the speed of the light horse stock, under the direction and influence of the Duke of Newcastle. The introduction of the new blood would give vigor to the stock, but as that blood was the blood of Turks and Barbs, probably but little if any larger than the native stock, the mystery still remains unsolved. In about one hundred years from that time the average size of the race horse had been brought up from less than fourteen to about fifteen hands. This increase of size cannot be accounted for on any other grounds than the introduction of the blood of some larger breed. We cannot conceive of this being the blood of the old Flanders stock that had been brought over centuries before; hence I am strongly of the opinion that the duke knew just what he was doing when he brought in a lot of stallions and mares (the latter called the “Royal Mares”) without telling anybody what they were or where they came from. This view is strengthened by the fact that none of the descendants of these mares, for several generations, ever made a mark upon the turf. If we reject this theory of the “Royal Mares,” we are then forced to the conclusion that the increase of size came chiefly from the large cold-blooded mares of the native stock. The fleet running families of the natives were small, and the imported Turks and Barbs were but little if any larger; hence, if we accept the evidence of our own senses and study the great variations in height, we cannot reject the conclusion that these variations had their origin in the size of the original elements entering into the formation of the breed.
What was the extent of the influence of the speed of the old English race horse upon the new race horse that sprang up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? This is a question that has not been very much discussed, but every intelligent and thinking man has given it more or less thought. Britain was not rapid in the progress of civilization and refinement, but through all the centuries of her history she had her race horses and she ran them. There can be no doubt that many of these native horses could outrun and outlast the best of the exotics that were brought in. None of those exotics, so far as we know, could run and win. Their value, then, was measured, not by what they could do themselves, but by what their progeny could do; and that progeny, at the foundation, carried half the blood of the old tribes. There were no racing calendars in the seventeenth century and none till the second decade of the eighteenth, and during all that time the blood of every man’s horse would, naturally, be fashionable blood. When the racing calendars were established they were a partial check upon untruthful representations, but this check only extended to the sire of the animal, and was then not always trustworthy. This left the whole maternal side open to all kinds of misrepresentation, and as the Anglo-Saxon race is fond of liberty, every man exercised the liberty of making his pedigrees to suit himself. Thus, through advertisements, sale papers, etc., great multitudes of fictitious pedigrees, all shaped on fashionable lines, gained currency and were propagated from owner to owner, from generation to generation. On this point I speak from the personal knowledge of a long lifetime in connection with such affairs in our own country, and I take it for granted that our English ancestors were no better and no worse than we are ourselves. This was the condition of things in England for about one hundred and fifty years, and when Mr. Weatherby was at work on the Stud Book he was overflowed with a flood of those bald-headed fictions, concocted by generations long past, and nobody could disprove them. In this way a large portion of the accumulated rubbish of past generations found its way into the English Stud Book and there it stands to-day, serving only to misguide the seeker after truth.
The earliest records of English racing commence with the year 1709, and at Newmarket 1716. There have been several racing calendars published at different times, but probably the best and most convenient for office use is the Racing Register published by Bailey Bros., commencing with the first and now filling several large volumes. In the early days very few of the winners even had any pedigree, but after the lapse of about fifty years we find it the rule to insert the sire of all winners, although there were still some exceptions. Under this usage it became possible in the course of time to establish the leading facts on the paternal side, and thus the work of the stud-book compiler was greatly facilitated. Those racing calendars, although intended merely to serve the convenience of men who bet their money, caring nothing for blood, served the more permanent and valuable purpose of fixing the paternal lines in the genealogy of the English race horse.
In 1786 Mr. William Pick, of York, England, published “A Careful Collection of all the Pedigrees it was then Possible to Obtain,” thus antedating Mr. Weatherby’s “Introduction” by five years. In 1785 Mr. Pick had commenced the publication of a racing calendar called “The Sportsman and Breeder’s Vade Mecum,” which was continued a good many years. These little annual volumes were well received, and they were the forerunners of Pick’s Turf Register, the first volume of which was brought out in 1703. This was the same year that the first volume of Weatherby’s Stud Book appeared, and there was a sharp rivalry between the two authors, not merely as two men, but as representing two divisions of the country. Mr. Pick was a Yorkshire man and Mr. Weatherby was a Londoner. Yorkshire claimed to be the “race-horse region” of England, and the Southrons were ready to fight rather than concede that claim. This rivalry survived two or three generations of racing men, and it is a question whether it has yet subsided. In the north Pick was the authority and in the south, Weatherby.
These two men worked on different plans, and each had its advantages. Pick limited his labors to the great animals of the past, and took them up in chronological order, giving a brief sketch of the history and performances of each. This plan required space, and when he had completed his first volume of five hundred and twenty-eight pages he had only reached the close of 1763. The second volume, bringing the work down to the close of 1772, made its appearance in 1805. Mr. Pick did not live to continue the work, and it fell into the hands of Mr. R. Johnson, who brought out the third volume in 1822, which continued the chronological order to the close of 1782. After the lapse of forty-five years, namely 1867, the fourth volume appeared under Mr. Johnson’s name, bringing the work to the close of 1792, and I am not aware that the work has been continued. These four volumes contained much that cannot be found elsewhere, and are very valuable.
When we come to study these assemblages of impossible things put together and called pedigrees, we begin to realize the absolute rottenness of the alleged pedigrees of that whole early period. Take, for instance, the case of the horse called the Bald Galloway. He bore this name because he had a bald face, and was of the Galloway breed. This Galloway breed took its name from the old Province of Galloway, in the southwestern part of Scotland. They were small, active horses and were famous for many generations as a breed of pacers. It has been said that the last pacers in Great Britain were found in Galloway. This horse, Bald Galloway, was foaled some time about 1708 and was famous as a fast race horse till he trained off at five years old. I think there is no doubt about his being a genuine Galloway, and if so how could he have a pedigree all of foreign blood and ending in a “Royal Mare?” This Galloway horse was the sire of the famous Roxana, that produced Lath and his full brother Cade, that made the early reputation of the great Godolphin Arabian. I will ask my readers to refer to the Curwen Bay Barb, No. 11, near the commencement of this chapter. This was one of the very best of all the Barbs imported, and his origin and history are given with unusual fullness, as well as an enumeration of the best of his get. In examining this enumeration it will be seen that a good number of his best foals were out of Galloway mares and are called “Galloways.” Brocklesby Betty was one of the great mares of her day, and the Stud Book says that “as a runner, she was thought to be the superior of any horse or mare of her time.” She was foaled 1711, was got by Curwen Bay Barb and out of Mr. Leedes’ Hobby Mare. She was a brood mare before she was trained, and her performances were soon after the establishment of the Racing Calendars, which show her great superiority. The “Hobbies” were a breed of Irish pacing horses that had been noted for more than a hundred years, on both sides of the Irish channel, as saddle horses, hunters, and runners. The theory that these “Irish Hobbies” were descended from the horses on board one of the ships of the Spanish Armada, that was wrecked on the Irish coast, is purely fanciful, for they were known as a breed long before the Spanish Armada was projected. The Hobbies were larger and better formed, as a rule, than the Galloways, and more highly esteemed. These illustrations of the influence and power of indigenous blood in the formation of the breed, known throughout the world as the English race horse might be extended indefinitely, but let these suffice. With the “Galloways” and the “Hobbies,” well known to our ancestors two hundred years ago as established breeds or tribes of horses, we cannot avoid the conclusion that they were very prodigal of fancy and very economical of truth when they attempted to clothe Bald Galloway, Leedes’ Hobby, etc., in foreign pedigrees to make them fashionable. Aside from the matters of evidence here introduced going to show the composite material entering into the constitution, structure and instincts of the race horse as he is today, there is another that plays a very prominent part in the combination. When we see a race horse fourteen hands high, and another of equally pure blood standing beside him seventeen hands high, we naturally wonder, and ask, Why this difference in size? The Turk, the Barb, the Hobby, the Galloway, and indeed all the old English racing stock, were very small, scarcely averaging fourteen hands. After we have made every allowance for a salubrious climate and a generous and unstinted dietary we must concede a gradual increase of growth, but these things fail to account for a difference of twelve inches in the height of two horses bred in the same lines for untold generations. The conclusion seems to be inevitable that there were big horses as well as little ones in the original combination of ancestors. From these diverse sources of his inheritance, it becomes plain to the mind of every one that the English race horse is thoroughly composite in the blood he inherits, and it is beyond the powers of analysis to determine whether one element did more than another in making him the fastest running horse in the world.
While it might be forcibly, if not conclusively, argued that the native English horse had in him all the elements necessary to the development of a breed of race horses as great as the breed of our own day, there is one fact ever present to the senses which goes to show that the influence of exotic blood was very wide and very powerful in controlling the action of the race horse. The popular and prevailing pacing action of the Hobbies, the Galloways, and other hunting, racing and saddle tribes was completely wiped out more than a hundred years ago. Any attempt to account for this revolution in the gait of the English horse as a fancy of fashion, or on the introduction of wheeled vehicles, fails to satisfy the understanding. In the first half of the seventeenth century pacers were popular, common, and abounded everywhere. In the second half of the eighteenth century not one could be found in all Britain, “from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s House.” Of all the facts that are known and established in the history of the English horse, the wiping out of the pacer is the most striking and significant. This exterminating process was not limited to the families that were intended for hunting or racing purposes, but extended to all types and breeds of English horses. The little English pacers that had been the favorites of kings and princes and nobles for so many centuries were submerged in the streams of Saracenic blood that flowed in upon them, and their only legitimate descendants left upon the face of the earth found homes in the American colonies. Their blood is one of the principal elements in the foundation of the English race horse, but the “lateral action” in his progeny was esteemed a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of the stallion, and it was sought to be covered up with something more fashionable in name. The old saddle horses of England were not all pacers, although that habit of action was very general among them, and in some families it was more uniform and confirmed than in others, and my authority for this conclusion will be found in the detailed account of the horses brought from England to the American colonies early in the seventeenth century. It is evident that from the day the blood of the Saracenic horse was brought in contact with that of the indigenous saddle horse, they were antagonistic, if in nothing more, certainly in the habit of action. The one never moved in the lateral action and the other very generally adopted that form of progression because it was his inheritance. What might have been the result if left to the laws of “natural selection,” it would be impossible to decide; but with the dictates of profit to the master, the mandates of fashion, and above all the accepted teachings of the Duke of Newcastle, the little pacer had no “friends at court,” and all he could do was to get out of the way, with his lateral action. In our own country and under the observation of everybody the pacer shows great tenacity to his long-inherited habit of action, and although buried in non-pacing blood, as supposed, for two or three generations, the pace is liable to appear again, at any time. So it was, doubtless in English experiences, but as the revolution was not retarded by the development of pacing speed, in one hundred years from the restoration, in 1660, there was no longer a pacer on British soil.
When the first Mr. Weatherby assumed the task of making and keeping a registry of English race horses, he seems to have had only a very faint conception of the magnitude of the undertaking. The first volume of his “General Stud Book” was published in 1803, and when it appeared it was found to contain so many things that were not true that the necessary work of revision and excision reduced its contents fearfully. In these eliminations he started in with a free hand, as is shown by comparison with later editions, but soon found that his book was disappearing very rapidly, and not much of it would be left, if he did not stay his hand. At this point he seems to have adopted some new rule, unfortunately, either of evidence or of date, probably the latter, for his work discloses the fact that he declined all responsibility for pedigrees as they came to him, of an earlier period than about 1780. Beyond that date nearly all the crude and impossible things of fiction were allowed to remain and are thus propagated as true, down to our own day. There was one rule, however, adopted very early in the management of this compilation that saved it from degeneracy, and that was the difficulty of getting into it. In all its history, from the beginning, it has been a kind of “close corporation,” and the animals in the volume of the last year are almost uniformly descended from the animals to be found in the first volume. The application of this rule, no doubt, worked an injustice in very many cases, but it made the English race horse a BREED, pre-eminent above all other horses for his unequaled speed as a running horse. This general rule restricting admissions to the descendants of such as had places in preceding volumes seems to have been followed and maintained with a good share of rigidity, by the different generations of the Weatherby family, in whose hands the compilation still remains. Whatever may have been the ratio of fables and forgeries in the first volume, they were there compacted and neither the Weatherbys nor the breeders have been much annoyed with them since. The plan of the Stud Book itself is very unsatisfactory to the careful student, for the reason that it admits of no details of breeder, owner, etc., that are of vital importance in tracing and identifying an unknown or disputed pedigree. While the plan is very desirable and effective in placing the produce of mares underneath the dams, it is very defective in relation to breeders, and subsequent owners. Unless the identity of the animal can be traced and established by the records, the pedigree is always doubtful. But notwithstanding the unsatisfactory plan of its construction, it has been honestly compiled, and we may safely accept its contents, back as far as the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Mr. Weatherby began his work; but when we reach the period of the eighteenth century, facts, fables and frauds are so inextricably mixed that whatever we accept must be cum grano salis. Beyond that period Mr. Weatherby furnishes nothing but the wildest fancies and traditions shaped up by those contributing them with a view to lengthen a pedigree and a price accordingly. All that we can ever know of the horses of that period we must gather from the little snatches dropped by contemporaneous historians.
In establishing his “General Stud Book,” Mr. Weatherby’s work may be compared to the building of an embankment around a great field which contained all the race horses of the realm. They were of all colors, all markings and all sizes, except the monster cart horse and the diminutive Shetland. They had all raced or possessed blood that had raced, and they all had pedigrees of various lengths and various degrees of reliability. They all walked and trotted and galloped, and there was not a pacer among them, for the last pacer had disappeared from England probably fifty years before this. The antagonism of the Saracenic horse had triumphed, and that antagonism was bred in the blood and bone of every animal in the field. They were placed there to be inter-bred and to produce race horses. Every one of the thousand owners was anxious to produce a great winner, and he was left to the exercise of his own fancy and judgment as to what cross would be most likely to prove successful, and to vindicate his superior intelligence. With, all experimenting outside of the breed practically barred, the instincts of the breed ripened and intensified until its representatives are able to beat the fleetest in the world at the gallop, but they could neither walk fast nor trot fast. It is doubtful whether any person in the world has ever seen a true-bred race horse that could trot a mile in four minutes. At this gait they show no aptness nor speed whatever. By breeding to fit the modern methods of racing, the speed of the race horse has been greatly increased, for short distances, but his stamina and endurance no longer command admiration as in former generations.
In the latter half of the last century there were a good many excellent trotters in England, but the further we get away from the blood of the old English pacer, the fewer the trotters we find, until at last there are none at all. It seems to be true of all countries that where there are no pacers there are no trotters. It was not the purpose nor wish of the English people to banish the trotter, but when the pacer was banished the trotter soon followed him.
VII. THE AMERICAN RACE HORSE
Antiquity of American racing—First race course at Hempstead Plain, 1665— Racing in Virginia, 1677—Conditions of early races—Early so-called Arabian importations—The marvelous tradition of Lindsay’s “Arabian”— English race horses first imported about 1750—The old colonial stock as a basis—First American turf literature—Skinner’s American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, 1829—Cadwallader R. Colden’s Sporting Magazine short-lived but valuable—The original Spirit of the Times—Porter’s Spirit of the Times—Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, 1859—Edgar’s Stud Book —Wallace’s Stud Book—Bruce’s Stud Book—Their history, methods, and value—Summing up results, showing that success has followed breeding to individuals and families that could run and not to individuals and families that could not run, whatever their blood.
Horses were kept for running, and horse racing was a common amusement in some of the American Colonies for about a hundred years before the first English race horses were imported. This embraces a century of horse history that, hitherto, has been practically unexplored and unknown. For the details of what I have been able to glean of this neglected and unknown century my readers are referred to the chapters on the different colonies. The first racing in this country of which we have any historical knowledge was organized by Governor Nicolls. In 1664 the Dutch surrendered the province of New Netherlands to the English, and the next autumn, 1665, the new race course at Hempstead Plains was inaugurated by the new governor of the colony. This course was named Newmarket, after the famous English course, and Governor Nicolls’ successors continued to offer purses on this course for many years, and after a time there were two regular meetings held there, spring and autumn. Owing to the distance of this course from the city, other courses, near at hand, were soon constructed and racing of all kinds and at all gaits held high carnival. The principal prizes were called “Subscription Purses,” the distance almost invariably two miles, and the weight carried ten stone. The horses that ran were known as “Dutch horses,” and were descended from the original stock brought from Utrecht, in Holland. They were larger than the English horses, and brought better prices, although the latter were esteemed more highly for their saddle gaits. I think the Dutch horses, originally, had no natural pacers among them, but for the pleasures and uses of the saddle they were inter-bred with the English horses and the mixed blood soon produced many pacers. It is probable also that this mixture increased the speed of the whole tribe. Thus racing continued with but few interruptions and without any known changes in the rules or conditions governing performances, except that after fifty years or more the weight to be carried was reduced from ten stone to eight stone. In the year 1751, which was eighty-six years after Governor Nicolls had established the Newmarket course on Long Island, we find the following significant condition inserted in the terms of entrance to the races, for the first time: “Free to any horse, mare, or gelding bred in America.” The simple meaning of this new condition was to “head off” the scheme of some “sharp” fellows who were, probably, then on the ocean with two or three English race horses, with which they expected to “gobble up” whatever stakes or purses came within their reach.
The first record we have of racing in Virginia is to be found in the court records of Henrico County, in the year 1677—twelve years after the establishment of racing in New York. For fuller particulars of this, the reader is referred to the chapter on that colony. The Virginians were a horse-racing people from the start, and it is impossible to tell how long before racing first commenced, but probably just as soon as any two neighbors met, each owning a horse, a few hundred pounds of tobacco were put up the next day, to make it interesting, in determining which was the faster. This racing feeling was not confined to neighbors nor to neighborhoods, but it pervaded the whole colony, and the people of every county had their annual and semi-annual meetings, which everybody attended. Their methods of handicapping will strike the present generation as somewhat peculiar. In their advertisements of the meetings, such language as the following was very common: “Sized horses to carry one hundred and forty pounds and Galloways to be allowed weight for inches.” From this we learn that the tribe of little Scotch pacers were still to the fore on this side of the water and that they were just as fleet as the larger horses, provided the weight was graduated to their inches. There was one feature in these race meetings that will be a surprise to many of my readers, as it was to myself, and that is the fact that at most of these meetings there was one four-mile race. Smaller prizes were run for by horses classed as to size, and it may be noted that there was one class “not exceeding thirteen hands.” At these meetings the distance never seems to have been less than one mile, while on the southern border of the colony and in North Carolina, quarter racing was very popular and very common from the earliest dates, and it was kept up through the greater part of the eighteenth century. For a fuller account of the racing of those early days the reader is referred to the chapter on Virginia.
In this old English, Irish and Scottish blood, full of the pacing element, which we may now call “native” blood, we have the real foundation upon which the English race horse was bred and from which has come the approximate if not the complete equal of the highest type of the English horse, in both speed and stamina. The English and the American race horse came from the same source and possess the same blood, with this trifling distinction—the native mares in England were bred to horses of exotic, Saracenic origin, while the native mares of America were bred to the descendants of that native-exotic combination. Hence, with the original maternal ancestry of the same blood, the combined and improved English descendant of that blood became the paternal ancestor of the American race horse. We must not forget that this “paternal ancestor” had been the result of crossing and recrossing, selecting, breeding and developing for nearly a hundred years, and that he was, therefore, a far better horse and far more prepotent as a sire than the produce of the first cross made under the direction of the Duke of Newcastle. We must not ignore the fact that while there were many stallions brought over in the early days there were also a few mares, but they were so few in number that their influence was hardly appreciable in the new breed to be established. Saracenic blood was touched very sparingly in the colonial days, as even the names of not more than three or four have been preserved in history. The only one of that period fully identified was named Bashaw and was kept on Long Island about the year 1768. Like all the others, he was called an Arabian, but according to the showing of his advertisement he was bred by the Emperor of Morocco, and was not an Arabian. Of the later period and coming down to about 1860 there are twenty-five or thirty that have been called “Arabians.” Near the head of the list stands one called “Arab Barb” or “Black Arabian Barb.” He was claimed to be an imported Barb from Algiers, and was seventeen hands high, “and coarse in proportion.” Many other so-called “importers” were equally absurd and dishonest in their claims, but there horses all passed as genuine “Arabians.” Out of the whole number called “Arabians” not more than five or six seem to have had a shadow of right to the name, and these exceptions were practically restricted to the animals imported by Mr. A. Keene Richards, of Kentucky. That each and all of these exceptions were irredeemable failures is a fact well known to all intelligent horsemen. This motley crew of “Arabian” importations came from all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, except Arabia, were all called “Arabians,” and they were all flat disappointments both as race horses and as producers of race horses.
Out of this list of thirty-five or forty so-called Arabian horses, there is one that requires special mention, not only because a correction may be made in his history, but because I have frequently spoken of him as the only Arabian that had left any mark upon the horse stock of the country. Lindsay’s Arabian, as he was called, was a grey horse and represented to be over fifteen hands high. The story is that he was a Barb and had been presented to the commander of a British man-of-war, when a colt, by the ruler of one of the Barbary States, as an expression of gratitude to the captain for having saved the life of his son. The captain sailed away for a South American port, and while lying there he took his present ashore to let him have a little exercise. The colt was given the free range of a lumber-yard, as the story goes, and in his playfulness a pile of lumber fell upon him and broke three of his legs. The British officer was greatly grieved at his loss and proposed to put the colt out of misery by knocking him on the head. There happened to be an American trading vessel in port and the skipper “allowed if he had that critter on his vessel he could save him.” The officer at once gave him to the skipper and told him his history. Yankee ingenuity and thrift soon got him aboard the trader and he was swung up and his legs properly bandaged. The surgical treatment was good, the bones knit, and in due time the vessel arrived at New London, and the colt was taken to the vicinity of Hartford. Just where this story originated it is not possible now to say, nor do I know that it ever had currency in Connecticut, but it was certainly rehearsed and probably believed in Maryland. He was owned by Colonel Wyllis of Hartford, and was advertised in 1770 under the single name of Ranger, and described as “a fine English stallion of the Barbary breed, bred in England.” From this it would appear that nothing was then known of his romantic history. As a part of his Maryland history it was said that General Washington’s attention had been attracted to a body of Connecticut cavalry by the excellence of their horses, and at his instance Captain Lindsay bought Ranger, because he was the sire of many of those horses, and took him to Maryland, where he was ever afterward known as “Lindsay’s Arabian.” The story of the indorsement of Washington made an excellent stallion card, and it is not necessary that we should inquire into it too closely, for the dates might raise a question. The horse passed from Colonel Wyllis to James Howard, of Windham, and was advertised by him as “The Imported Arabian Horse called The Ranger to stand at his stable the season of 1778.” Hence we must conclude that he was not taken to the South before the season of 1779, or possibly later. Then, as now, to catch the popular fancy, North and South, the horse is no longer an “English stallion of the Barbary breed” but an “Imported Arabian Horse.” His cross was well esteemed in his day, and it has held its place in the estimation of all the experienced horsemen as a good cross in an old pedigree. We now see that he was bred in England, that he was got by a Barb horse or the son of a Barb horse, and that it is not probable there was a single drop of Arabian blood in his veins. This little sketch will serve to illustrate the methods, general and particular, that were invariably used to place a fictitious value upon the so-called imported “Arabians.” In no other department of human knowledge has there been such a universal and persistent habit of misrepresenting the truth of history as in matters relating to the horse. It seems to have been, and still is, a kind of psychical contagion that has been generating dishonesty and a habit of lying in the minds of the great body of horsemen for the past two hundred and fifty years. If a horse is brought from Turkey, or Syria, or Egypt, or Spain, or Morocco, or any of the Barbary States, he is at once called an “Arabian.” This is worse than a misnomer, for it is an essential untruth, and its universal use does not redeem it from its essence of deception and fraud. It must be conceded, however, that this deception may have sprung from bad teaching and ignorance rather than from a depraved moral sense, for many people, as well as the poets and the novelists, may have concluded that as the nations named above got their religion from Arabia, so they got their horse stock from the same country, and thus the horses brought from Turkey, or Syria, or Egypt, or Spain, or Morocco, or any of the Barbary States, are descendants of the Arabian horse and thus entitled to the name “Arabian.” This seems to be the only theory upon which this universal misrepresentation can be palliated. Let us repeat a sentence or two here, to show what history reveals on this point. Strabo says there were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the Christian era. Philostorgius says that in the year 356, two hundred “well-bred” Cappadocian horses were sent as a present to the prince of Yemen, by the Emperor Constantius. These were the first horses in Arabia. In the days of Mohammed horses were exceedingly scarce in Arabia, and they have remained so to the present time. The horse is an expensive exotic in Arabia, as he is never used for any domestic purpose, nor for any other purpose except robbery or display. For all domestic and commercial uses the camel is far better. All the countries named above were abundantly supplied with horses, at least eight hundred or a thousand years before there were any horses in Arabia. The Moslems got their religion from Arabia, but not their horses. This topic is more fully discussed in the chapter on the Arabian horse.
The importation of English race horses to this side of the water commenced about the year 1750, and that being the middle of the last century it is easy to remember the date when the line was drawn between the old and the new elements appearing on the race course. The following six animals were brought over within a year or two of that date—Monkey, Traveller, Dabster, Childers, Badger, and Janus. A few others might be named, but some at least are mythical. Of those here named, Traveller was the great horse. Janus became the progenitor of a tribe of very fast quarter horses, and although he did not found that tribe, which had been in existence for a hundred years on the border line between Virginia and North Carolina, he doubtless improved it. Monkey was twenty-two years old when he came and did not live long. The whole number imported into all the colonies before the war of the Revolution counts up to about fifty, and some of these are practically unknown, and a few of them were wholly fictitious. Maryland, I think, was first in the field of importations, and then followed Virginia, New York, and North Carolina. Possibly the very earliest importations were made in South Carolina, but there is not much evidence that those importations were utilized to any extent for racing purposes, and hence we know but little of the doings of that colony till a later date. There were not more than about twenty mares of English race-horse blood imported, in the quarter of a century preceding the Revolution, into all the colonies. As many of these animals of both sexes were stolen or destroyed during the war, we can approximate with some degree of certainty the great reduction in this producing force by the time the war ended and importations again commenced.
Now, we have before us the old colonial running stock that had been tested in many a battle and found able to cover the distance of two to four miles, and we have also the new running stock that had never been asked to go any further, but we have no actual, authentic and reliable knowledge of the comparative speed of the two classes. There were no stop watches nor records of time kept in those days. This much only we know, that prizes were offered for “half-breds” for a few years, but when it was found that some of the half-breds could run just as fast and as far as some of the whole-breds, this class of prizes was withdrawn. Then commenced the manufacture of fraudulent pedigrees, for, it was argued, “How could an American horse beat an English horse unless he had English blood and plenty of it?” Hence, when a horse won that fact was taken as proof that he was full bred, and no time was lost in investing him with a first-class, pure-bred pedigree. This was a little onerous on the few imported mares that were known and named, as in the case of imported Mary Gray, for she had to produce eleven filly foals by imported Jolly Roger in order to accommodate her numerous progeny, as alleged, and how many more claims were made of the same pedigree it would be very difficult to estimate. When it began to appear a little awkward to require Mary Gray to have, on paper, more than eleven filly foals by Jolly Roger, it was soon, discovered that it was less perplexing and at the same time less liable to be “cornered” by saying “dam an imported English mare.” No doubt there was a great deal of sharp practice, to say nothing of cheating and lying, about horse matters in Colonial times, but those little venialities were only the blossoms indicating the mature fruits of deceptions and frauds that were to follow when pedigrees would be considered an element of value in the running horse, and when every man would have the power, in fact, to make and print his pedigrees to suit himself. This brings us to a very brief consideration of what has been done in the direction of correcting the frauds of the past and preventing them in the future.
The period of fable and of falsehood in the genealogy of the American race horse seems to have commenced not long after the first importations of English race horses. In the first generations from the imported English horse and the native mare, it was rather difficult for a man to fix up a pedigree for his half-bred colt that would show him to be full bred, but after forty, fifty, or sixty years had elapsed the events became misty, and then every man exercised the right to make his own pedigrees to suit his own fancy. This seems to have been the condition of things for many years, and while there were a few honest men who would stick to the truth, the great majority either made their pedigrees to suit themselves or employed some “expert” to make them for them. The confusion which ensued was most perplexing, and the slipshod manner in which editors and writers on the horse did their work was most discouraging. Whatever was found in print on a crossroads blacksmith shop door was taken as authentic, because it was in print.
In 1829 Mr. John S. Skinner, of Baltimore, Maryland, commenced the publication of a monthly magazine, entitled “The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine,” and as it really “filled a long-felt want,” it received a very encouraging support. As its name indicated its field, it at once became the authority on sporting events and the receptacle of a great amount of valuable correspondence on the horses of the day, as well as the earlier race horses. Mr. Skinner was industrious in collecting material for his magazine, but unfortunately he published whatever was sent to him relating to the horse, and just as it was sent. If a communication was well written, no difference how many errors of fact it might contain, it never seemed to occur to Mr. Skinner to use his blue pencil. Pedigrees were sent in, amounting to many thousands, during his ownership, with fictitious and untruthful remote extensions, and published without any possibility of tracing the different crosses to a known or responsible source or name. Here was the opportunity of a lifetime to “fix up” the pedigrees of stallions to suit the public demand and the fees sought by their owners, send them to Mr. Skinner, and have them duly spread before the public in all their dishonest finery. The early volumes are very rich in the accumulations of pedigrees, such as they are, and hence very valuable. The magazine received less and less attention from its proprietor each succeeding year and finally it was transferred to the Spirit of the Times, of New York, and died after an existence of some fifteen years.
Mr. Cadwallader R. Colden, of New York, commenced the publication of another sporting magazine, that was of very great merit, and did much to correct some of the errors that abounded in Mr. Skinner’s publication. In the controversies which naturally sprang up he had greatly the advantage of his adversary, for he knew horse history and Mr. Skinner did not. Mr. Colden was a man of marked ability, and over the signature of “An Old Turfman” he made himself famous as a writer. He hated a fraud and wherever he saw one he did not hesitate to hit it. His publication was a large and expensive one, racing was then under the periodical interdict of public opinion, and after about two or three years, and greatly to the loss and misfortune of the truths of horse history, the publication was discontinued. The weekly press had no representative in the field of “horse literature and sporting subjects” until early in the thirties, when the Spirit of the Times was founded by William T. Porter. The conception of a weekly paper devoted to all kinds of sports, such as hunting, fishing, racing, gaming, etc., was not only new in this country, but it was brilliant. Mr. Porter was not only a gentleman in his appearance and manners, but he had fine social qualities and was a writer of ability and polish. Such a personage would naturally gather about him friends and correspondents that were congenial, and very soon The Spirit of the Times became noted as the organ of a great body of educated men who loved sport and enjoyed wit. It was the only publication of its kind on the continent, and it soon obtained a very wide circulation. Mr. Porter knew very little of horses, either theoretically or practically, but he was a ready adapter and wrote some fine descriptions of famous racing contests. His habits were sportive rather than industrious, hence he left nothing behind him of value to his friends or to the world except the mere fact that he was the founder of the first sporting paper in this country. In course of time the paper with all its belongings became the property of John Richards, the former pressman, and Mr. Porter had to look for a living wherever he could find it. Mr. George Wilkes then took him under his wing, and started a new sporting paper called Porter’s Spirit of the Times. The use of this name carried with it the support of a good many friends, but as he was not able to write anything, practically, for the new paper, from its very commencement in September, 1856, it failed to yield any support to Mr. Porter, and not much to Mr. Wilkes and his partners. Litigation arose and Mr. Wilkes finally withdrew from Porter’s Spirit of the Times, and started Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times in September, 1859. We then had three sporting papers all claiming to be the original and only legitimate Spirit of the Times. Among their readers they were distinguished as the Old Spirit, Porter’s Spirit, and Wilkes’ Spirit. The circulation of the Old Spirit was largely in the Southern States, and the war destroyed it, in 1861. Porter’s Spirit having but little money and still less brains, died about the same time. This left Mr. Wilkes in open possession of the field, and his remarkably trenchant articles on the conduct of the war gave Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times a very wide circulation, even among those who cared nothing for sporting matters. At the same time he was fortunate in securing the services of Mr. Charles J. Foster, an able writer on horse subjects, and a very industrious and capable man in managing and discussing affairs connected with the horse. Some years later, Mr. Wilkes dropped his own name from the title of his paper, and not long afterward he added twenty-five or thirty years to its age by changing the numbers so as to cover the period of the original Spirit of the Times founded by William T. Porter. The old sporting publications, one and all, maintained the view, so far as they ever had any view to maintain, that all that was of any value in the American horse, for whatever purpose, had come down to us from the Arabian through the English race horse. Their value, therefore, consists wholly in the naked statistics which they contain.
The first attempt made in this country, in the direction of publishing a stud book of American race horses, was the product of Patrick Nesbitt Edgar, an eccentric and apparently not well-balanced Irishman, who was a resident of North Carolina. This book, which purported to be a “first” volume, was very remarkable in many respects, two or three of which I will enumerate. The prevailing absence of dates and all means by which the truth or falsity of a pedigree could be determined; the astounding number of crosses given, even to the immediate descendants of imported sires; the multitude of animals never heard of before nor since, with pedigrees extended a dozen crosses; the absence of many animals that everybody had heard of. This book had been in print about thirty years before I ever saw it, and the first impression it made on my mind was that the author was “clean daft.” At the same time, through all his work there was a “method in his madness,” going to show the care he had taken to exclude or suppress any little fact that might lead to detection and exposure. As an illustration of his methods I will take the following pedigree, at random, as given by him and copied, literally, by Mr. Bruce, following the particular form of the latter:
CENTAUR, b. h. foaled 1767, bred by ——; owned in Virginia, got by imported Stirling (Evans’) (foaled 1762).
1st dam by imp. Aristotle (imported 1764).
2d dam by imp. Dotterel.
3d dam by imp. David (imported 1763).
4th dam by imp. Ranter (imported 1762).
5th dam by imp. Othello (imported 1755).
6th dam by imp. Childers (imported 1761).
7th dam an imported, thoroughbred mare.
Now, what do we know about this pedigree that has been indorsed and published, just as here stated, by two stud-book makers? They do not pretend to know by whom he was bred, nor do they know in what part of Virginia he was owned, but they assume to know perfectly well each cross in his pedigree and that his seventh dam was an imported, thoroughbred mare. The dates of importations in parentheses in the foregoing have been placed there by myself for the sake of the exhibit. The horse Dotterel, the original of that name and by the same reputed sire, never left England, and it is probable this Dotterel is mythical. Now, let us analyze this pedigree by the aid of the searchlight of dates. Ranter, imported 1762, might have had a filly to his credit in 1763. This filly at two years old might have been bred to David and produced a filly in 1766. This filly at two years old might have been bred to Dotterel and produced a filly in 1769. This filly at two years old might have been bred to Aristotle and produced a filly in 1772. This filly, at two years old, might have bred to Evans’ Stirling (or Starling), and produced the colt Centaur in 1775—but he was foaled in 1767. Not once in a million times would this succession of possibilities occur, but if they did occur in this case the pedigree of Centaur still remains absolutely impossible, for four generations of horses cannot be crowded into five years. This exhibit fairly illustrates the character of Mr. Edgar’s work, and being right on the border line between the “native” race horse and the modern “thoroughbred” we see just how they compressed the breeding of eight generations into the space of fifteen or sixteen years. If we were to compare the English with the American methods of manufacturing pedigrees, it would be hard to determine which was the more shamefully dishonest. Mr. Edgar was fiercely dissatisfied with the indifference of horsemen to his enterprise, and with the lack of support which they rendered him. He went forward with his second volume and professed to have completed it, but announced that it should never be put in type until the horsemen of the country should assist and support him. In the event of their failing to do so he threatened to sink his manuscript twenty feet deep in the center of the Dismal Swamp, where no mortal would ever find it. The second volume never appeared, and it is to be hoped he carried out his threat.
For the second attempt at compiling a stud book of American Race Horses I must, myself, plead guilty. Some time in the “fifties” I came into possession of a number of volumes of the “old” Spirit of the Times, Skinner’s American Turf Register, three or four volumes of the “English Stud Book” and a large number of volumes of the English Sporting Magazine. As I was then dabbling slightly around the edges of “horse literature,” I found this little nucleus of a library very convenient, but very unsatisfactory in answering questions that came to me, and which an official position seemed to require that I should be able to answer. When asked for the pedigrees of other domestic animals I could take down the Herd Books of the different leading breeds and give precise information, but when asked about the pedigree of a horse, unless he was greatly distinguished as a racer, days of solid labor might be expended on the one question and then not discover the information sought. It was, perhaps, ten years after this time before I ever saw or heard of the misbegotten and foolish compilation of pedigrees made by Edgar. For some years this labor of compilation was prosecuted at odd hours, for my own personal use and satisfaction, and without the remotest purpose of ever publishing a stud book. As I plodded my way along, finding what I supposed to be a fact here and another there, and often conflicting, I found myself invariably accepting what was longest as a pedigree, as this feature seemed to be evidence not only of completeness, but of truthfulness at the same time. As my gleanings grew in volume my interest in what I was doing became more absorbing and intense, and when I had completed the search of every page and paragraph of my published sources of information, up to the close of the year 1839, I found I had enough matter for a large volume. About this time I came into possession of a copy of “Edgar’s Stud Book”—and I was greatly perplexed to know what to do with it. The copyright was dead and it contained a good many unimportant and utterly unknown things that I had not met with in all my gleanings. Under these circumstances and considering the fact that it abounded in the crudest uncertainties, to call them by no harsher name, I concluded to use his work in all cases where I did not have a pedigree from other sources, to cut off all imaginary extensions and to insert his name, in every case, as the source of information and responsibility. The work then went to press and the first volume of “Wallace’s American Stud Book” made its appearance in 1871. The time and labor expended on the first volume made me quite familiar with the leading performers of the several generations embraced therein, and the work on the second volume went forward with more ease and rapidity, and in 1871 I had completed the gleaning of all publications relating to the race horse, up to the close of 1870.
This second volume, being about the size of the first, was completed and put in due form for the compositor, but never was published. The reason why it was never published may not be without interest to the student of horse genealogy, and I will, in a few words, state that reason. Side by side with the progress of the second volume of the runners, I was carrying forward a careful investigation of the lineage of the early trotters and their progenitors. As there were no trotting records giving pedigrees, I was compelled to go back to the breeders as the only source of reliable information. When I obtained this from intelligent and reputable people I accepted the information and stood by it as the truth; and when I came to compare it with the representations of pedigree made in advertisements of some stallion scion of the family, the truth began to dawn upon me that advertisements, whether in newspapers or on crossroads blacksmith-shop doors, with scarcely an exception, were made up of statements that were utterly false and fictitious. They were made up for the single purpose of securing patronage, and generally traced in different directions to famous and well-known horses. The fictitious extensions of stallion advertisements have served as the basis for the fictitious extensions of families and tribes. When I came to compare the extensions of trotting pedigrees with running pedigrees, I could not discover that the one was any more or less reliable than the other. They rested on precisely the same basis of stallion pedigrees, and no difference whether they appeared in Mr. Skinner’s Turf Register or in a big poster, there was no censorship, and they were both in type—and whatever was in type was generally supposed to be worthy of belief. In one respect the pedigrees of running horses are more reliable than the early advertisements of trotting horses, particularly with those that raced, for they were required to give the sire and dam when they were entered in races, and a failure to comply with this rule was penalized. The sires, therefore, are generally right, but unfortunately the rule did not require the dam to be named and definitely specified, hence any one of a dozen unnamed mares by a given horse could be represented in after years as the dam of that particular horse. Here commenced the trouble in the unnamed and untraced mares that never have been nor ever can be identified. On a careful and sorrowful review of my work of many years I found that I had been working on a wrong basis from the start. Instead of discovering and arranging a great many valuable truths, as I supposed, I had devoted years to perpetuating thousands and thousands of fictions in these unknown, unnamed, and unidentified dams. This is the reason the second volume of “Wallace’s American Stud Book” never was published. The only benefit I ever derived from the work was in its educational aspects. The work made me familiar with the early running-horse history of this country and of England, and taught me what so many horsemen should learn—that a truth is always better than a lie. The more carefully and thoroughly I went into the origin, lineage and history of what we may call the modern race horse, the more evident it became to my mind that the great mass of the running horses of our own generation are carrying, in their pedigrees, the frauds and fictions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to say nothing of the innumerable deceptions and tricks of our own century. To accept and propagate these untruths is simply to, in a manner, indorse them, and an attempt to eliminate them would invoke the clamors of a continent. Hence, more than twenty years ago, I washed my hands of all responsibility for the pedigrees of English race horses, and turned my attention to establishing the lineage of the American trotter, on sure foundations, and building him up into a breed.
The third attempt at compiling the pedigrees of running-bred horses was made by Mr. Sanders D. Bruce, of New York, and as it followed Edgar and Wallace, it was made up chiefly of what he found in these works. The conscienceless fictions of Edgar were accepted without hesitation or remorse, and the central aim seemed to be to make every pedigree as long as possible, whether true or false. No fictitious stallion advertisement was ever too absurd to serve as a basis for the pedigrees of all his kindred. Mr. Bruce accepted everything and rejected nothing, and it is not probable he ever investigated a pedigree in his life. His rule of action seems to have been to please his customers, and to scrupulously avoid all public discussions of pedigrees. This was the politic course to pursue, for any attempt to defend the monstrosities it contained would have wiped it out of existence very quickly. Bruce’s Stud Book seems to have been supported by a few individuals, from the beginning, as a kind of eleemosynary institution, and it is not likely it will ever rise above that condition.
The substantial correctness of the generations extending back for a period of sixty or eighty years, and in some cases even a little further, is a very valuable contribution to our store of knowledge in this department of industry, but, unfortunately, the generations beyond those that may be classed as recent very largely rest upon foundations that are fictitious and fraudulent.
These fictions and frauds are so general and common in the remote extensions on the female side of the pedigree that when we find a string of ten or perhaps twenty dams and not one of them named, known or identified until we strike the twenty-first, and she described as “thoroughbred, imported mare,” we know that this is the work of the professional “pedigree maker,” and not more than once in a hundred times will we be mistaken. This is alike true of both English and American pedigrees of race horses. The modern crosses are comparatively honest, but the remote extensions, through the maternal lines, in both countries are chiefly the products of a venal imagination.
There are some foundation truths in the history and development of the English and American race horse—for they are both one in blood—to which I must briefly advert before dismissing this topic. In announcing the conclusions which I have reached, I am fully conscious that I will come in contact with preconceived opinions that have been very prevalent, if not universal, for at least two centuries.
1. There were race horses in England that had been racing and breeding for centuries before the first Saracenic horse was brought there, and it was not an uncommon thing for the native to beat the exotic, when he first arrived. There had been racing in America, by what we will call the native stock—but they were all English and Dutch—for about one hundred years before the first English race horse reached this country.
2. These horses had been selected with care and bred for centuries with more or less intelligence, with the single purpose of increasing their speed. During those centuries there were not so many writers on biology, heredity, etc., as we have now, but the old aphorism, “Like begets like”—a complete epitome of all science on this subject—was just as well known and as universally believed a thousand years ago as it is to-day. We may, therefore, safely conclude that at the close of the sixteenth century there were many native English horses, descended from lines and tribes that had been selected, raced and bred for generations, that were fully the equals of the best of the exotics, that were brought in about that time.
3. The native stock of England at the close of the sixteenth century, was the stock from which the American colonies received their first supplies, except the few brought from Utrecht, in Holland, to the Dutch Colonists in New York. When brought across the Atlantic, especially in Virginia, no time was lost in continuing their development as race horses, which was carried forward for nearly one hundred years before the first English race horse was imported for their improvement. Their regular racing was at all distances, up to four miles.
4. On this basis of the native English blood, common to both countries, the breed of English and American race horses was built up. The foreign elements brought into England were chiefly from the Barbary States and from Turkey. This exotic blood certainly had a very marked effect upon the horse stock of Britain, but it cannot be said, with certainty, that it increased the speed of the race horse. All the experiences of the past hundred years with these foreign strains have gone to show that instead of increasing the speed they have retarded it.
5. The list of the foundation stock of the English race horse as given by Mr. Weatherby, in the first volume of the English Stud Book, and reproduced in the preceding chapter, is worthy of very careful study, especially by those who seem to think that the English race horse is descended, without admixture, from the Arabian horse. The striking feature of that list is the overwhelming preponderance of other blood than the Arabian, even if we accept all that is called Arabian as genuine. Mr. Darley’s horse, called an Arabian, and Lord Godolphin’s horse, called an Arabian, count for more than all the others put together, in the make-up of the English race horse. Mr. Darley’s horse came from a region remote from Arabia and where a thousand good horses are bred for one in Arabia, and should be called a Turk. Lord Godolphin’s horse—“the great unknown”—will ever remain unknown. He seems to have been traced to France, and, after studying his portraiture, it is probable he was a French horse.
6. Taking this list of foundation stock and viewing it from the standpoint of the greatest lenity and liberality that a sound and careful judgment can accord, we find that the inheritance of Arabian blood in the veins of the English race horse, if there was any such inheritance at all, was strictly infinitesimal. This historical fact in the foundation of the race horse, showing the inutility of Arabian blood, whether genuine or spurious, has been fully confirmed in great multitudes of trials, in both nations, during the past hundred years. In no case has it been a benefit, but always a detriment.
7. The race horse has been bred through centuries for the single purpose of speed. Through all his generations he has been the product of the brains, judgment and skill of his successive masters. Parents were selected that could go out and win the prizes from their fellows. The next generation was not only the product of running parents, but parents that were from running families. Thus grew up the pedigree of the race horse under the direction of thought and judgment. Pedigrees are practical things and full of winners, and in no sense made more valuable by having some supposed “Arabian” cross away back ten generations, that never ran in his life.
VIII. COLONIAL HORSE HISTORY—VIRGINIA
Hardships of the colonists—First importations of horses—Racing prevalent in the seventeenth century—Exportation and then importations prohibited—Organized horse racing commenced 1677 and became very general—In 1704 there were many wild horses in Virginia and they were hunted as game—The Chincoteague ponies accounted for—Jones on life in Virginia, 1720—Fast early pacers, Galloways and Irish Hobbies—English race horses imported—Moreton’s Traveler probably the first—Quarter racing prevailed on the Carolina border—Average size and habits of action clearly established—The native pacer thrown in the shade by the imported runner—An Englishman’s prejudices.
The colony of Virginia, settled at Jamestown, May 13, 1607, was subjected to a succession of dissensions, privations and disasters extending through a number of years. The elements of which this first plantation was composed were heterogeneous, and many of them wholly unsuited to battle with the hardships and privations of the wilderness. A very large proportion of the adventurers were mere idlers at home, descended from good but impecunious families, and had never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Too proud to labor even if they had known how, hunger and rags soon made them the most unhappy and discontented of mortals. The governmental affairs of the colony fell into confusion, like the people forming it, and we have no official record of what was done for a number of years. All that is known today of what transpired in the early years of the colony has been gleaned from the personal correspondence of actors in the many strifes that came so near destroying them all. These letters are, generally, so strongly imbued with partisan feeling that there seems to be no room left to tell us anything about the industrial growth of the colony, either in planting or breeding. The excerpts, therefore, relating to the early horses of Virginia which I have been able to gather from a great many sources, will fall far short of being complete, but I think they will serve as a basis upon which to form an intelligent estimate of the Virginia horses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as to the nineteenth, the newspapers will furnish everything what is needed.
It is evident that the fleet of three vessels which took out to Virginia the first adventurers took also some horses and mares with them; for the governor and council, who went out the next year, in reporting the condition of the colonists to the home company, under date of July 7, 1610, use this language:
“Our people, together with the Indians, had, the last winter, destroyed and killed up all our hogs, inasmuch as of five or six hundred, as it is supposed, there was not above one sow that we can hear of left alive, not a hen or a chick in the fort, and our horses and mares they had eaten with the first.”
From a letter written by M. Gabriel Archer, who arrived in Virginia August 31, 1609, we gather the following facts:
“From Woolwich, the fifteenth day of May, 1609, seven sail weighed anchor and came to Plymouth the twentieth day, where George Somers, with two small vessels, consorted with us. There we took into The Blessing, being the ship wherein I went, six mares and two horses, and the fleet layed in some necessaries belonging to the action; in which business we spent time till the 2d of June, and then set sail to sea, but crossed by South West winds, we put into Falmouth, and there stayed until the 8th of June, then gate out.”
Now, as The Blessing was probably about the average size of the rest of the fleet, I think it is reasonable to conclude that each of the other vessels took some horses also. In a report of a voyage to Virginia, dated November 13, 1611, we find the following statement: “They have brought to this colony one hundred cows, two hundred pigs, one hundred goats, and seventeen horses and mares.” In 1614 the Virginians made a raid on Port Royal, in what was then called New France, and carried off to Virginia, among other captures, a number of horses, mares and colts. A second raid in the same quarter seems to have resulted in carrying off wheat, horses, clothing, working tools, etc.
Mr. Harmor, writing in 1614, in his “True Discourse on the Present State of Virginia,” says: “The colony is already furnished with two hundred neat cattle, infinite hogs in herds all over the woods, some mares, horses and colts, poultry, great store, etc.”
In 1894, in the Public Records Office in London, I found that the Virginia Company had sent out four mares, February, 1619, on The Falcon. And further, I found a kind of summary of what the company had done in the past toward populating and supplying the colonists with live stock. It is stated that they had sent twelve ships, taking out one thousand two hundred and sixty-one persons, making the total number in Virginia at that date about two thousand four hundred. The exportations include five hundred cattle, with some horses and goats, and an infinite number of swine. In 1620 the company ordered twenty mares to be sent over, at a cost, delivered, of fifteen pounds each. From the price of horses in England at that day, I would infer that somebody was making money out of the colonists.
In a little work published in London, 1646, entitled “A Perfect Description of Virginia,” the author says that “There are in Virginia, of an excellent raise (race), about two hundred horses and mares.” It is evident that this statement is a mere estimate, and I am disposed to think it a very wild estimate from what follows in a very few years. It is true that horses do not propagate and increase as fast as any other variety of domestic animals, but under the circumstances every effort would be made to increase the stock, and from what follows, I think my criticism will be sustained.
In the legislation of the colony we find no mention of horses, till the year 1657, when the exportation of mares was prohibited. Eleven years after this (1668) this restriction was removed and the exportation of both mares and horses permitted. The very next year, 1669, the importation of more horses was prohibited by legislative enactment. From this it would seem that there were already too many horses in the colony, or possibly some horse breeder had begun to realize that there were better horses in some of the other colonies that were finding a market in Virginia, and they thus sought “protection” for their own stock.
This prohibition could not have been aimed at the mother country, for the prices obtained would not justify the cost and risk of a sea voyage. We must, therefore, conclude that it was intended to shut out the New England colonies, which were already shipping horses to all the settlements on the seaboard, as well as to some of the West India Islands. In this we see at what an early date commenced the interchange of commodities among the colonies. As early as 1647 the Dutch authorities at New Amsterdam authorized Isaac Allerton to sell twenty or twenty-five horses to Virginia.
The court records of Henrico County, Virginia, for the year 1677 contain three distinct trials growing out of horse races for that year. In one case the contest was for three hundred pounds of tobacco; in another the winner was to take both horses; in the third the amount at issue does not appear. From the readiness at sharp practice and from the cunning dodges to get clear of paying a bet it is very evident that the principals and the witnesses were well up in all the tricks of racing as it was practiced at that early day. How long before 1677 racing was practiced in Virginia I have no means of determining, but the next year and the next, continuing to the end of that century, the records of the court speak for themselves. In these trials I find the names of Thomas Jefferson, Jr., grandfather of President Jefferson, and also the name of Benjamin Harrison, the ancestor of two presidents, although they were not principals in any of the cases.
In Beverley’s History of Virginia, published in London, 1705, at section ninety-four, we have the following:
“There is yet another kind of sport, which the young people take great delight in, and that is the hunting of wild horses; which they pursue, sometimes with dogs and sometimes without. You must know they have many horses foaled in the woods of the uplands, that never were in hand and are as shy as any savage creature. These having no mark upon them belong to him that first takes him. However, the captor commonly purchases these horses very dear, by spoiling better in the pursuit, in which case he has little to make himself amends, besides the pleasure of the chase. And very often this is all he has for it, for the wild horses are so swift that ’tis difficult to catch them; and when they are taken ’tis odds but their grease is melted, or else being old they are so sullen that they can’t be tamed.”
In the number of Wallace’s Monthly for September, 1877, p. 684, will be found a very interesting article from the pen of the late Dr. Elwood Harvey, on “The Chincoteague Ponies,” that have from time immemorial occupied, in a wild state, the islands of Chincoteague and Assoteague off the eastern shore of Virginia and Maryland. The traditions relating to their origin are very hazy and improbable, and the most reasonable one, because it is within the range of possibilities, is that a Spanish ship was wrecked off this part of the coast and the original ponies were on board and swam ashore. It is well established that they have occupied the islands for more than a hundred years. They are about thirteen hands high, uniform in shape and resemble each other except in color, for all colors prevail. Some of them pace a little, and they have rather light manes and tails, and no superabundance of hair on the fetlocks. Now, the horses of Virginia, at the period of which Mr. Beverley writes, and of which I will have something further to say as we progress, were but little if any larger than these semi-wild inhabitants of the islands; they were of all colors and many of them paced. As it is well known that the action of the ocean, so unaccountable to all human ken, one year builds up a dike connecting islands with the mainland, and the next year, perhaps, washes it out again, we can thus easily understand how a herd of these semi-wild animals may have been caught and kept there. In this way, it seems to me, the origin of the Chincoteague ponies may be easily and rationally accounted for, without any shadow of violence to the clearest reasoning. Mr. Hugh Jones, who, in many directions, seems to have been a closer observer of the life of the colonists than any of the other tourists whose writings we have examined, wrote a little work entitled “The Present State of Virginia,” which was published in London, 1724, expressing himself as follows, on page 48:
“The common planters, leading easy lives, don’t much admire labor or any manly exercise except horse-racing, nor diversion except cock-fighting, in which some greatly delight. This easy way of living, and the heat of the summers, make some very lazy, who are then said to be climate struck. The saddle horses, although not very large, are hardy, strong, and fleet; and will pace naturally and pleasantly at a prodigious rate. They are such lovers of riding that almost every ordinary person keeps a horse, and I have known some spend the morning in ranging several miles in the woods to find and catch their horses only to ride two or three miles to church, to the courthouse or to a horse race, where they generally appoint to meet on business, and are more certain of finding those they want to speak or deal with than at their home.”
Mr. Jones here places us in close contact with the character and habits of the people of that day, as well as with the character and qualifications of their horses. It is not to be inferred, I think, that all their horses were pacers, but that all their saddle horses were pacers there can be little doubt. This is the first intimation we have from Virginia that some of their pacers were very fast, and when Mr. Jones says “they could pace naturally and pleasantly at a prodigious rate,” he means that the speed was marvelous, wonderful, astonishing. This “prodigious rate,” in a good measure, balances Dr. McSparran’s account of the Narragansett, which he had seen go a mile “in a little over two minutes and a good deal less than three,” and gives strength to the statement of Mr. Lewis, that when a boy he had ridden in pacing matches and return matches between the Rhode Islanders and the Virginians.
In the Virginia Gazette, under date of January 11, 1739, we find the following advertisement, to which we invite special attention, as it brings out some facts which, inferentially, throw a great deal of light upon horse racing, up to that period:
“This is to give notice that there will be run for at Mr. Joseph Seawall’s, in Gloucester County, on the first Tuesday in April next, a Purse of Thirty Pistoles, by any horse, mare or gelding; all sized horses to carry 140 lbs. and Galloways to be allowed weight for inches, to pay one Pistole entrance, if a subscriber, and two if not, and the entrance money to go to the second horse, etc. And on the day following, on the same course, there will be a Saddle, Bridle and Housing, of five pounds value, to be run for by any horse, mare or gelding that never won a prize of that value, four miles, before. Each horse to pay five shillings entrance and that to go to the horse that comes in second. And on the day following there is to be run for, by horses not exceeding thirteen hands, a hunting saddle, bridle and whip. Each horse to pay two shillings and sixpence at entrance, to be given to the horse that comes in second. Happy is he that can get the highest rider.”
The first point suggested by this advertisement is that there were no distinctions made except by size, and that, at this date, 1739, there were no English race horses then in Virginia. The second point is that there was such a thing as “horse size” but what size this was I have not been able to discover. The third point is that Galloways were allowed weight for inches. They were evidently below “horse size.” But they were expected to enter for the big purse of the meeting, and they must, therefore, have ranked as good race horses; but what did they mean by “Galloway?” This is the only instance in which I have met the term in Virginian history, although it is well known in general horse lore. “Galloway” is an old name of a territorial division of Scotland, embracing Wigtonshire, part of Ayrshire, etc., in the southwestern part of that country, and was at one time famous for the excellence of its pacers, and it is probable they were to be found there after the influx of eastern blood had driven the pacer from all other portions of Great Britain. The Irish Hobbie, always undersized, was a famous race horse, as well as a pacer, many generations before the period now under consideration. The name “Galloway” is only known in history and is not to be found on any modern map. I have learned by many experiences that the name is very generally believed to be Irish and is confounded with “Galway,” an Irish county. It is known that an Irish gentleman shipped many cattle to the colony, and it is quite possible that he shipped horses also, and if this reasoning be right, these “Galloways” may have been Irish “Hobbies.” It will be observed, also, that the distance to be run is not definitely stated, but it is fairly to be concluded that the race of the second day was to be four miles, and none of them less than one mile, and that in heats. Races of four-mile heats were very common long before the first English race horse was imported.
We here have a stock of horses that the people of Virginia have bred and ridden and raced for a hundred years, and we know comparatively nothing about them. They seem to have been specially adapted to the saddle, but they could run four miles, or they could run a quarter of a mile, like an arrow from a bow. They were not a breed, although selecting and crossing and interbreeding for a hundred years would make them quite homogeneous. There is a romantic interest attaching to these little horses, for we have reached the middle of the eighteenth century, and all the successive idols of this race-loving people are about to be dethroned by their own act, and their homage transferred to a stranger—a larger and finer animal and faster over a distance of ground. Whatever of glory and honor, to say nothing of money, that was to be achieved from this time forward was to be ascribed to the newly arrived English race horse. But the truth should not be concealed that this old stock furnished half the foundation, in a vast majority of cases, for the triumphs of future generations of the Virginia race horse, and the same may be said of the old English stock upon which the eastern blood was engrafted. About the middle of the eighteenth century the line was drawn, and there was thereafter developed the engrafting of the new upon the old. In 1751-52, Moreton’s imported Traveller was there, and he was the only English race horse advertised that year. There may have been two or three others, but they had not made themselves known to the public, and I very much doubt whether there was any other. A very few years later there were many others, and some of them of great celebrity.
Mr. J. F. D. Smith made an extended tour of the colonies, especially of Virginia, before the Revolutionary war, and he suffered some of the inconveniences growing out of the rising hostility to the mother country. In speaking of quarter racing, he says:
“In the southern part of the colony and in North Carolina, they are much attached to Quarter Racing, which is always a match between two horses to run one quarter of a mile, straight out, being merely an exertion of speed; and they have a breed that perform it with astonishing velocity, beating every other for that distance with great ease, but they have no bottom. However, I am confident that there is not a horse in England, nor perhaps in the whole world, that can excel them in rapid speed; and these likewise make excellent saddle horses for the road.”
It will be observed that Mr. Smith speaks of these heavily muscled horses as a breed, which expression, I suppose, is intended to be used in a restricted sense. In the many generations of horses that would necessarily succeed each other in a century, in the hands of a people so devotedly fond of racing, it is merely an exercise of common sense, among barbarous as well as civilized people all over the world, to “breed to the winner.” In this way, and without any infusion of outside blood, there would be improvement in the strength and fleetness of all animals bred for the quarter path. He remarks further that “these likewise make excellent saddle horses for the road.” In that day nothing was accepted as a “saddle horse” that could not take the pacing gait and its various modifications. This was true of Virginians of that day, and it is still true of their descendants who have built up new States further west.
In the early days, as already intimated, it was the habit of Virginians to brand their horses and then turn out all not in daily use to “hustle” for their own living. As a matter of course these animals would often stray long distances away, and not a few never were found. In due time, legislation provided for the recovery of estrays, embracing all kinds of domestic animals as well as negro slaves. Fortunately this enables me to reach what may be considered “original data,” in determining the size and habits of action of the early Virginian horses. As the field of my examination, I have taken the Virginia Gazette, for the years 1751 and 1752, published at Williamsburgh, and in these volumes I find a great many advertisements of “Strayed or Stolen” animals scattered through the pages; and in the second especially a great many “Taken Up” advertisements appear. In a very large proportion of these notices, perhaps a majority of them, all the description that is given is the color, sex and brand, with occasionally some natural mark. As a matter of course these are of no value for the object in view. In some cases the size is given without the gait, and in others the gait is given without the size, in a few both size and gait are given. The range of size is from one of fifteen hands down to one of twelve hands, with more of thirteen hands than any other size, either above or below. The true average of the whole number is a little over thirteen hands and one inch, and none of them are called ponies. As further evidence of the small size of the colonial Virginia horses we find that in 1686 the legislature of Virginia passed an act providing for the forfeiture of all stallions under thirteen and a half hands high found running at large. It provided that any person might take up such stallion and carry him before a justice of the peace, and if he measured less than thirteen and a half hands, the justice was required to certify to the measurement and the facts, and the horse passed legally to his new owner.
As to the gaits I find just twice as many pacers as trotters. Double-gaited animals, of which there were a few, I have here classed with the pacers. That many of these little fellows were very stout and tough is fully demonstrated by the fact that they could run heats of four miles with a hundred and forty pounds on their backs. This closes the first epoch in the history of the Virginia horse. The fleet and compact little horse of thirteen to fourteen hands had had his day, and he was now about to be overshadowed by a greater in speed and a greater in stature. Much of the blood of the little fellow that could run four miles and pace “at a prodigious rate,” was commingled with the blood of the English race horse, but whatever its triumphs, the lately arrived “foreigner” took the credit. A man would have been pronounced “clean daft” if at that time he had dreamed that one hundred and forty years later the blood of this little pacer would stand at the head of the great trotting interest of the world. The tough little fellow has retained his qualities through all the generations in which he has been neglected, despised and forgotten, until he was taken up twenty odd years ago, and now the names and achievements of the great pacers are as familiar to the whole American people as ever were the name of the greatest running horses. It is not known how long he continued to be a factor in the racing affairs of Virginia, but probably not later than about 1760.
From about 1750 to 1770 seems to have been a period of great prosperity in Virginia and, notwithstanding the general improvidence of the times, many of the large landholders and planters were getting rich from their fine crops of tobacco and their negroes. This prosperity manifested itself strongly in the direction of the popular sport of horse racing and improving the size, quality, and fleetness of the running horse. England had then been selecting, importing Eastern blood, and “breeding to the winner” for a hundred years, with more or less intelligence and success, while the colonists had rested content with the descendants of the first importations from the mother country. Doubtless progress had been made here too, but it was as the progress of a poor man against another with great wealth and backed by the encouragements of royalty. The English horse could then run clear away from the Saracenic horse, his so-called progenitor, and he was very much larger than that “progenitor.” We can understand how the speed might be increased by its development in a series of generations and by always breeding to the fastest, but the increase of size can hardly be accounted for as the result of climatic causes—but we are getting away from the thought before us. When the Virginia planter found he had a handsome balance in London, subject to his draft, he at once ordered his factor to send him over the best racing stallion he could find. The action of one planter stirred up half a dozen others who felt they could not afford to be behind in the matter of improvement, but more especially that they could not afford to be behind in the finish at the fall and spring race meetings of the future. These importations went on continuously for about twelve years, and until they were interrupted by the excited relations and feelings between the colonies and the mother country and the preparations for the War of the Revolution, which was then imminent. After the close of the Revolution a perfect avalanche of race horses was poured upon us, some of which were good, but a great majority of them were never heard of after their arrival, on the race course or elsewhere. But up to the close of the century they had not succeeded in exterminating the pacer—the saddle horse of a hundred generations.
As a specimen of how absurdly a man can talk and even write on subjects of which he knows nothing, I cannot refrain from giving the following from what an Englishman had to say in 1796 about the horses and horsemanship of Virginia:
“The horses in common use in Virginia are all of a light description, chiefly adapted for the saddle; some of them are handsome, but are for the most part spoiled by the false gaits which they are taught. The Virginians are wretched horsemen, as indeed are all the Americans I have met with, excepting some few in the neighborhood of New York. They ride with their toes just under the horse’s nose, and their stirrup straps left extremely long, and the saddle being put three or four inches on the mane. As for the management of the reins, it is what they have no conception of. A trot is odious to them, and they express the utmost astonishment at a person who can like that uneasy gait, as they call it. The favorite gaits which all their horses are taught are a pace and a wrack. In the first the animal moves his two feet on one side at the same time and gets on with a sort of a shuffling motion, being unable to spring from the ground on these two feet, as in a trot. We should call this an unnatural gait, as none of our horses would ever move in that manner without a rider; but the Americans insist upon it that it is otherwise, because many of their colts pace as soon as born. These kind of horses are called “natural pacers” and it is a matter of the utmost difficulty to make them move in any other manner. But it is not one horse in five hundred that would pace without being taught.”
There can hardly be a doubt that our English friend in his “Travels Through the States” noted and wrote down just what he thought he saw, and when he saw anything that he never had seen in England, he was ready to either deny its existence altogether or to insist that there was some mistake about it. Poor man, he could not understand how there could be anything outside of England that could not be found in England. His vision, mental and physical, seems to have been restricted to the shores of his own island home, and he was probably a descendant of a very good man we once heard of. As you sail up the Firth of Clyde you pass an island of three or four miles in extent, called Cumbrae. At the head of ecclesiastical affairs in the island was a very pious man, some generations back, and every Sunday morning he prayed that the Lord would bless the “kingdom of Cumbrae and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland.” The author of “Travels Through the States” was evidently one of the very numerous descendants of this good man, as they are scattered all over England, and as I am a strong believer in the laws of heredity, I can hardly avoid this conclusion. Indeed, some of the numerous tribe, tracing their genealogy through many generations back to “The kingdom of Cumbrae,” have found their way across the water, and at another place I will pay my respects to them. But to return to our traveler: there can be no doubt about his never having seen a pacer in England, for the last one had disappeared before his day, unless an occasional one might have been found in the old province of Galloway, in the southern part of Scotland. If he had known the history of the horses of his own country he would have known that from the time of King John down to that of James I., the pacer was the most popular and fashionable horse in England, and that the nobility and gentry used no other kind for the saddle. He was always of “a mean stature,” but he was compact, hardy and strong, and could carry his burden a long journey in a day with great ease and comfort to his rider. In the reign of Elizabeth, he was kept separate from others, and bred as a breed on account of his easy, gliding motion, which he transmitted to his progeny. At the time of the plantation of the English colonies in this country the pacers were very numerous, and as they were just the type of horse suited to wilderness life, a very large proportion of those selected were pacers. The pacers our traveler saw in Virginia were the lineal descendants of the original English stock brought over by the adventurers, and the awkward riding charged upon the Virginians, with some evident exaggerations, was wisely and sensibly adapted to the action of the horses they were riding. The criticism of the long stirrups is wholly unjust, as they are just the right length for the “military” seat, and nobody in this country when mounted on a real saddle horse would ever think of taking any other. The Englishman, when mounted on his “bonesetter,” is compelled to have his stirrups short so that he can rise and fall with every revolution the horse makes on the trot to save himself from being shaken to death. This up and down, up and down, tilt-hammer seat, if it can be called “a seat” at all, is one of the most ungraceful things, especially for a lady, that can be conceived of in all the displays of good and bad equestrianism. The English have been compelled to adopt it because they have no trained saddle horses, and a lot of brainless imitators about our American cities have followed them because “it is English, you know.” If the English had pacers and horses trained to the “saddle gaits,” they never would have anything else, and the tilt-hammer “seat” would disappear from Rotten Row and everywhere else.
IX. COLONIAL HORSE HISTORY—NEW YORK
Settlement of New Amsterdam—Horses from Curaçoa—Prices of Dutch and English horses—Van der Donck’s description and size of horses—Horses to be branded—Stallions under fourteen hands not to run at large—Esopus horse—Surrender to the English, 1664—First organized racing—Dutch horses capable of improvement in speed—First advertised Subscription Plate—First restriction, contestants must “be bred in America”—Great racing and heavy betting—First importations of English running horses—Half-breds to the front—True foundation of American pedigrees—Half bushel of dollars on a side—Resolutions of the Continental Congress against racing—Withdrawal of Mr. James De Lancey—Pacing and trotting contests everywhere—Rip Van Dam’s horse and his cost.
For several years after Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch, discovered the harbor of New York and the great river which took his name, in the year 1609, there is uncertainty and doubt as to the nature of the settlement. For a time it seems to have been merely a trading post, occupied only by those in the employment of the company that owned it, and without many of the elements requisite to make up a permanent colony. At Fort Orange (Albany) and at Esopus (Kingston), the conditions were the same as at New Amsterdam, as New York was then named. The first party of immigrants that seemed to have the elements of permanent colonization about it arrived in 1625, and consisted of six families and several single men, making in all forty-five persons, with furniture, utensils, etc., and one hundred and three head of cattle. Doubtless some of these “cattle” were horses, and the general instead of the specific term was used in enumerating them. Very little is known of the early horse history of the New Netherlands, as the whole region was then named; there can be no doubt, however, that they increased and multiplied. Sometime, probably about 1643, a cargo or two of horses were brought up from Curaçoa and Azuba, in the Dutch West Indies, but the climatic change was too great for them, and they did not do well, being specially subject to diseases from which the Dutch horses seemed to have complete immunity. In 1647, Isaac Allerton, as agent, was authorized to sell twenty or twenty-five of these horses to Virginia, and whether the authorities were able thus to get clear of a bad investment does not appear from the existing records. In a report to the home company, made in 1650, I find the following prices were given at that time: A young mare with second foal, one hundred and fifty florins; stallion, four or five years old, one hundred and thirty florins; milch cow, one hundred florins. The same report makes a comparison by giving the prices of New England horses, as follows: A good mare one hundred to one hundred and twenty florins; stallion, one hundred florins; milch cow, sixty to seventy florins. Neither horses nor cows were then allowed to be shipped out of the province without permission of the council.
Adrien Van der Donck wrote a description of New Netherlands which was published 1656, in which he speaks of the horse stock as follows:
“The horses are of the proper breed for husbandry, having been brought from Utrecht for that purpose; and this stock has not diminished in size or quality. There are also horses of the English breed which are lighter, not so good for agricultural use, but fit for the saddle. These do not cost as much as the Netherlands breed and are easily obtained.”
From a large number of facts collected for the years 1777 and 1778 the horses then averaged about fourteen hands and one inch, and when compared with earlier data it is evident they had increased in height. In the gaits of those advertised, fifteen both paced and trotted, nine trotted only, and seven paced only. As this was in the period of the Revolution, and right in the center of hostilities, some allowance should be made for horses from other colonies.
The people of this colony, like those of all the others, branded their horses and turned them out to seek their own living in the summer season, and this resulted in many losses, and oftentimes in much bad feeling. The Dutch were not accustomed, in the “old country,” to building fences around their crops high enough and strong enough to keep out all the droves and herds of animals running at large. In the line of improvement and increase of size in their horses, they provided that all stallions running at large, of two years and nine months old, must be fourteen hands high or be castrated. This law was in force in 1734, and no doubt was effective. Among the many laws for the suppression of vice of different kinds, I find one prohibiting horse racing on Sunday, and from this we might infer that it was not forbidden on other days of the week.
In old newspapers, advertisements, etc., we sometimes come across “Esopus Horses, Esopus Mares,” and, for years, I was not able to tell what this term meant. The locality of Kingston was originally called Esopus, and in that neighborhood there were several farmers who bred horses largely, at an early day in the history of the colony, and the locality became famous for the character and quality of the horses produced there. They were of the best and purest Dutch blood, and for what we would call “all-purpose horses” their fame was very wide in that day. Hence I infer that the term “Esopus” was used to indicate what was considered the best type of Dutch horses. There is danger of going astray in the meaning of the term “Dutch horses,” as in later times it was applied to the great, massive draft horses of Pennsylvania. They were better “for agricultural purposes,” as Van der Donck puts it, than the Connecticut horses, because they were larger and stronger, but they were sprightly and active and some of them could run very well. They had a fine reputation in the adjoining colonies.
New Amsterdam, and consequently all the plantations in New Netherlands, surrendered to Colonel Nicolls, commanding the British forces, August 27, 1664. Colonel Nicolls remained as governor of the colony three or four years and until he was succeeded by Governor Lovelace. Among his early official acts, Governor Nicolls laid out a race course on Hempstead Plains, and named it Newmarket, after the famous course in England. No engineering or grading was necessary, as nature had already made a perfect course without stick or stone or other obstruction. The first race was run 1665, and although it was a long distance from the city, the presence of the governor gave the occasion prestige and there was a great gathering of the gentry from town, and the farmers of Long Island. These meetings were kept up annually by the appointment of succeeding governors, and after a time they were held twice a year, spring and fall. There are some very important facts about these races that are not known and probably never will be known, namely, who were the nominators and what breed of horses were entered in these contests. With these two essential facts left out the value of the information is greatly impaired. As it is known, however, that there were but two breeds or types of horses that could have been engaged in these contests, it becomes a matter of interest to reach a conclusion as to which were the victors. Mr. John Austin Stevens has done some very excellent work on this part of the horse history of New York, but I cannot agree with him in his characterization of the Dutch horses as being Flemish. They did not come from Flanders, but from Utrecht. They were not great unwieldy brutes, such as we would associate with Flanders, but hardy, compact animals that could make their way in the wilderness. Although larger, it does not follow that they could not run as fast or even faster than the New England ponies. All breeds of horses were very much smaller two hundred years ago than they are now. These races were instituted, evidently, for the improvement of the breed of horses in the colony, and the great majority of these horses were the descendants of the original stock brought from Utrecht. We must, therefore, conclude that they were not slow, heavy, unwieldy animals with no action, as the language of Mr. Stevens would seem to imply, but capable of improvement in the direction of speed. No doubt there were very many New England horses in the colony, “lighter and better adapted to the saddle,” but neither the interests nor the pride of the old Dutch settlers would have permitted them to support racing for a period of more than eighty years, unless the early Utrecht blood was represented. Besides this, the weights carried, one hundred and forty pounds, and the distance, generally two-mile heats, were conditions that were strongly against the New Englanders, even if they were lighter of foot. With these two breeds in the field, we may accept it as an inevitable sequence that the superior qualities of the one would very soon be engrafted on the other, and by this process of breeding, a better type would be produced than either of the originals. This first step was only a prelude to the next, and that again to the next, until the common, plain lesson was thoroughly learned, that if a running horse was wanted the way to get him was to breed to a running horse that had proved he was a running horse. The improvement became very wide and general, and occasionally an animal was produced with such phenomenal speed that he was barred from stakes and purses. On this foundation, and this alone, the running turf was built up and continued for about eighty years, with occasional intervals, when the gamblers made it so nasty that no decent people would go near it.
The first subscription plate race of which we have any trace is to be found in the New York Gazette, of September 27, 1736, of which the advertisement is given below. The course indicated is believed to have been on the Church Farm, west of Broadway, and not far from where the Astor House now stands. There is no account of what horses won, and all we know is just what is in the advertisement.
“On Wednesday, the 13th of October next, will be run for, on the course at New York, a plate of twenty pounds’ value, by any horse, mare or gelding, carrying ten stone (saddle and bridle included), the best of three heats, two miles each heat. Horses intended to run for the plate are to be entered the day before the race, with Francis Child, on Fresh Water Hill, paying a half pistole each, or at the post on the day of running, paying a pistole. And the next day being the 14th, will be run for, on the same course, by all or any of the horses that started for the twenty-pound plate (the winning horse excepted) the entrance money, on the conditions above. Proper judges will be named to determine any disputes that may arise. All persons on horseback or in chairs, coming into the field (the subscribers and winning horse only excepted) are to pay sixpence each to the owner of the grounds.”
Passing on to 1747 we find a duplication of the foregoing for the plate race of that year, with some variations. Entries are restricted to animals that never won a plate before “on this island,” and a horse named Parrot is not permitted to compete. This race was advertised to take place on the Church Farm. The next that I will notice is the advertisement of this same stake for 1751, when the weight was reduced to eight stone, and in addition to the usual exclusion of previous winners, we have for the first time a restriction of the entries to animals “bred in America.” At the May meeting at Hempstead Plains, the year following, 1752, the entries are again restricted to animals “bred in America.” From this, then, we are able to fix the precise period when English Race Horses were first brought to this colony. At this time there were two or three other courses on Manhattan Island, besides several noted speeding grounds on the roads and elsewhere, for the trotters and the pacers, of which no advertisements appear, and consequently no notice was taken by the newspaper press.
From about 1760 up to the time when the Revolutionary struggle began to engross and absorb all thought and all action, racing received a tremendous impetus, not only in this colony but in others. Ten or twelve years before this a very few rich men in Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina commenced importing English running-bred horses with great success, and Mr. James De Lancey and other rich men of this colony were only a year or two behind them. This fancy grew and spread until a great many breeders and planters of the richer class had imported stock of their own, while their less wealthy neighbors were well supplied with half-breds. These half-breds were, for a short time, classed by themselves and purses were offered and run for, restricted to this class. After experimenting with animals bred in this way it was found that not a few of them were able to hold their own in any company. Mr. Morris’ mare Strumpet was only half-bred, but she was able to beat many of the imported animals, as well as the full-breds that started against her. From this it would appear that breeding for speed for a hundred years had produced results in this country as well as in England. These experiments led many owners of old-fashioned stock to try it, and right there is where thousands and thousands of our best old American pedigrees end. The decade from 1750 to 1760 witnessed a complete transformation from the old methods to the new, from the old blood to the new, and more than all from the old managers to the new. During the next decade, from 1760 to 1770, the new blood came out in great strength, and the saturnalia of horse racing grew more and more furious. Purses of a hundred dollars, as in the olden time, sprang up to ten times that sum, and matches were made for sums that were fabulous in that day. One match, between Mr. Delaney of Maryland and Mr. De Lancey of New York, specified the consideration on each side as a half bushel of silver Mexican dollars, and the Marylander had the satisfaction of carrying home a bushel of silver dollars. The great struggle, in New York, for supremacy on the turf was between the De Lancey family and the Morris family. These two families had been bitter political rivals for years, and when they met on the turf it was for “blood.” The De Lanceys were Tories and the Morrises were Whigs, and this intensified the feeling that had so long existed between them. When the Continental Congress adopted that remarkable resolution, advising the people to abstain from horse racing, cock fighting, gambling and some other more slight offenses, on the grounds of “economy,” in view of the approaching conflict with the mother country, the effect was thrilling and electrical. Every man who loved his home and his country obeyed it. True, as I have said, it was drawn in the form of advice and in the interests of “economy,” but there was but one great evil, one great prodigality at which it was aimed, and that was the gambling connected with horse racing. It was well aimed and struck the bull’s eye. It came in the midst of preparations for the greatest race meetings ever then projected, but everything was dropped and there it lay through all the years of the bloody struggle and until peace again smiled upon a land of free men. Before avowed hostilities commenced, Mr. James De Lancey, one of the first and largest importers and breeders of his day, sold out every animal of the horse kind that he possessed and retired to England. Thus, as the colonial period drew to its close, the brave little colonial horse that had weathered the storms of a hundred winters and carried his master in safety and comfort through all that time, is superseded by another race, and no one has ever attempted to write even so much as his epitaph.
As the contests of speed considered, up to this point, have all been at the running gait, I must not close my review of this colony without giving some attention to the pacers and the trotters. At these gaits all sources of information are almost hopelessly barren of facts and incidents. We know that the running horses of the colonial period were the saddle horses of the country, and we know that the best and most fashionable saddle horses were pacers. When we connect these two facts and place them alongside of the pacing and trotting experiences of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, we have no difficulty in reaching the safe conclusion that the same conditions would produce the same results as in those two States. Pacing and trotting contests were just as frequent and as exciting in this colony as in any other, but they were sustained chiefly by road-house keepers and butchers, and were never advertised. Matches were made one hour and decided on the road in the next. In the “Annals of New York,” compiled and published in 1832, by John F. Watson, we find the following curious, but very valuable, scrap of horse history:
“Some twenty or thirty years before the Revolution, the steeds most prized for the saddle were pacers, since so odious deemed. To this end the breed was propagated with much care. The Narragansett pacers of Rhode Island were in such repute that they were sent for, at much trouble and expense, by some few who were choice in their selections. It may amuse the present generation to peruse the history of one such horse, spoken of in the letter of Rip Van Dam of New York, in the year of 1711, which I have seen. He states the fact of the trouble he had taken to procure him such a horse. He was shipped from Rhode Island in a sloop, from which he jumped overboard when under sail, and swam ashore to his former home. Having been brought back he arrived in New York, in thirteen days’ passage, much reduced in flesh and spirit. He cost thirty-two pounds and his freight fifty shillings. This writer, Rip Van Dam, was a great personage, he having been president of the Council in 1731, and on the death of Governor Montgomery that year, he was governor, ex-officio, of New York. His mural monument is now to be seen in St. Paul’s Church.”
As New England saddle horses were only worth forty dollars in 1650, and this horse cost more than four times as much, when horses were more plentiful, we must conclude that he was a fine specimen of the breed, and was, probably, bought for stock purposes. The date of this transaction is a significant fact that should not be forgotten, as 1711 is the same year in which the first of the two great founders of the English race horse, Darley Arabian, was brought to England.
X. COLONIAL HORSE HISTORY—NEW ENGLAND
First importations to Boston and to Salem—Importations from Holland brought high prices—They were not pacers and not over fourteen hands—In 1640 horses were exported to the West Indies—First American newspaper and first horse advertisement—Average sizes—The different gaits—CONNECTICUT, first plantation, 1636—Post horses provided for by law—All horses branded—Sizes and Gaits—An Englishman’s experience with pacers—Lindsay’s Arabian—RHODE ISLAND, Founded by Roger Williams, 1636—No direct importations ever made—Horses largely exported to other colonies 1690—Possibly some to Canada—Pacing races a common amusement—Prohibited 1749—Size of the Narragansetts compared with the Virginians.
In 1629 the London founders of the plantation of Massachusetts Bay sent out six vessels laden with emigrants, horses, cattle, goats, etc. These vessels brought some twenty-five head of mares and stallions, that were valued at six pounds each and all owned by the company in London, except three mares from Leicester, that were owned by private parties. At that time there seems to have been some rivalry between Boston and Salem as a shipping point, but this fleet came to Boston harbor. This same year (1629) Salem seems to have had six or seven mares and one stallion, besides forty cows, and forty goats. From this it might be safely inferred that a part of this fleet put into Salem harbor, or that there may have been another and somewhat earlier shipment of which we have no details. Salem was really founded in 1626, and the settlement at Charlestown, Boston, dates from the same year. The next year about sixty head were shipped to the plantation, but many were lost during the voyage, of both horses and cattle. Several other shipments followed, but nothing worthy of special note, till 1635, when two Dutch ships arrived at Salem with twenty-seven mares, valued at thirty-four pounds each, and three stallions. Some writers have spoken of these mares as “Flanders mares,” but I have not been able to find any evidence or even indication that this might have been the fact. The records show they were Dutch ships, and that on a given day they sailed out of the Texel, a Dutch port, far away from Flanders. I think, therefore, we are safe in concluding they were “Dutch mares,” and they should be so designated. Just about this period they were bringing Dutch horses from Utrecht, in Holland, to the Dutch colony at New Amsterdam, and it was well known in Holland as well as in New England that the Dutch horses brought much better prices in New England than the English importations. It is probable, further, that these Dutch traders were looking out for a choice of markets, as between New England and New Netherlands. These mares were valued at thirty-five pounds each, the record says, but we are not informed as to the price that was really paid for them. There is a very wide discrepancy between the figure at which these mares were “valued” and the cost of the mares that were brought from England. The English company charged the colony six pounds each for the horses sent from there, and ten pounds freight.
I have labored assiduously to get at such data as would afford a safe basis upon which to determine the size and other qualities of these Dutch horses. They were larger than the English horses of that period and they were more muscular, with greater weight of bone. They were, doubtless, better adapted to the various offices of the “general purpose” horse than their English contemporaries, in every respect, except the saddle. There is no distinctive evidence that they were pacers or could go any of the saddle gaits, in their own right. It is probably safe to conclude that the original importations would not average more than fourteen and a half hands high, and very likely the exact truth, if it could be reached, would place them below that figure rather than above it. The process of reducing the size commenced as soon as they arrived: for the English horses had saddle qualities which the Dutch did not possess, and everybody wanted a saddle horse. Still the Dutch blood was highly prized, and a hundred and fifty years afterward it was no uncommon thing, especially in the valley of the Connecticut, to meet with the advertisements of stallions seeking patronage on the strength of “Dutch blood.” This, for a time, was a puzzle to me, but as we consider the horse interests of the region of the Hudson and the Mohawk Valley extending eastward and that of eastern Massachusetts extending westward along with the current of emigration, it is not difficult to understand how the blood of the Dutch horse should have become so generally diffused. On the one hand we had the much-desired saddle qualities, and on the other we had the much-desired increase of size without deterioration in appearance. Thus owners were accommodated and the horse stock of the country was improved by the interbreeding of the two nationalities. It is not necessary to further particularize different importations. It is sufficient to say that they were very numerous, and the multiplying of the stock was carried forward with vigor and success. Five years later—1640—the colonists not only had all the horses they needed, but they shipped a cargo of eighty head to Barbadoes. From the colony of Massachusetts Bay all the plantations of New England secured their foundation stock of horses, hence they are here considered collectively.
The people of the Plymouth plantation were very slow in providing themselves with horses, and it was not till after 1632 that they had any. It is hard to conceive of a colony like that of Massachusetts Bay living and flourishing for a period of, say, eighty years without a newspaper, and yet such is the fact. The Boston News-Letter, the first newspaper, so called, in this country, was established May 29, 1704, and it lived many years. The early colonial newspapers, from one end of the land to the other, were anything and everything but newspapers, as we understand the meaning of the title in our day. If a boy fell off a building in London and broke his leg, six weeks before, it was liable to appear as an item of “news” in the local American newspaper, but if the same accident happened the week before, in a neighboring town, it was never mentioned. The name “newspaper” attached to such publications was a fraud.
The following is a copy of the first horse advertisement ever published in this country, and for that reason it is worthy of preservation. It was taken from the Boston News-Letter of November 19, 1705:
“Strayed from Mr. John Wilson of Braintree, at Mr. Havens’ in Kingston, in Narragansett, about a fortnight ago, a sorrel mare, low stature, four white feet, a white face, shod all round, her near ear tore, has a long white tail and mane. Whoever will give any intelligence of her ... will be sufficiently rewarded.”
As this was in the period when the Narragansett pacers had reached their greatest fame, we might argue that this mare had been sent down to Kingston from Braintree, Massachusetts, to be wintered and to be bred in the spring to some famous horse in Kingston, the very center of the horse-breeding interests of that day.
Under the date of June 17, 1706, I find a bay horse advertised as “strayed or stolen: fourteen hands high, hardly possible to make him gallop,” and October 28, 1706, a black gelding “fourteen hands high, paces, trots, and gallops.” Then in the years 1731 and 1732 I find a “black mare fourteen and three-quarter hands, trots and paces;” a “black horse twelve hands,” no gait given; “black gelding, fourteen hands, races, trots, and gallops;” “bay horse large, good pacer;” “roan mare, fourteen hands, paces and trots.” But the field which I specially gleaned was for the years 1756-59, where I found the average height was fourteen hands one inch, the data including eight pacers and two trotters. This, I think, may be taken as fairly representative of the size and habit of action of Massachusetts horses in the first half of the eighteenth century.
In 1636 the first plantation was made in Connecticut at Hartford by the Rev. Thomas Hooker and over a hundred of his congregation with him. They left nothing behind, but brought all their domestic animals to their new home. I have not been able to discover just how many horses they brought with them, but in a few decades they had a great abundance and to spare. In 1653 the General Court at New Haven made provision for keeping public saddle horses for hire and fixed the rate of charges for their use. It also prohibited the sale of horses outside of the colony. In 1658 all horses, young and old, had to be branded by an officer appointed for that purpose, and it required several years of legislation before the system of branding, selling and recording could be so perfected as to prevent dishonesty and frauds. In 1674 an act was passed providing and enjoining that all colts entire and stallions running at large, under thirteen hands high, should be gelded. This law also required a good deal of amending before it could be made to work smoothly. The size of the Connecticut horses about the time of the Revolution was an average of thirteen hands three inches, thus ranging below the other New England colonies. In 1778 horse racing was prohibited under the penalty of forfeiture of the horse and a fine of forty shillings. In 1776 a careful compilation of the gaits of the horses of that period, embracing nineteen individuals, taken as they came, showed that fifteen were pacers, or pacers and trotters, and four were trotters only. As an evidence of the quality of the Connecticut pacers, take the following passage from a little volume published 1769, in England, entitled “A Voyage to North America,” by G. Taylor, Sheffield, England, 1768-69:
“After dinner at New London, Conn., Mr. Williams and I took post horses, with a guide to New Haven. Their horses are, in general of less size than ours, but extremely stout and hardy. A man will ride the same horse a hundred miles a day, for several days together, in a journey of five or eight hundred miles, perhaps, and the horse is never cleaned. They naturally pace, though in no graceful or easy manner, but with such swiftness and for so long a continuance as must seem incredible to those who have not proved it by experience.”
This is a very different view of the pacer from that expressed by another Englishman who visited Virginia in 1796. He had never seen a pacer before and he was wholly unwilling to believe his host when he assured him it was a natural gait and that many colts paced from the day they were foaled. This, to the mind of the Englishman could not be true, he says, “for none of our horses ever move in that manner.” (See Virginia, pp. 117-118).
The most noted horse ever owned in Connecticut, at least in colonial days, was the horse named and known in later times as Lindsay’s Arabian. When I was younger I accepted the marvelous story of the origin and early history of this horse, of which a brief account is given in the chapter on the “American Race Horse,” to which reference is here made. This acceptance on my part of the romantic story was largely superinduced by a statement made by a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, that he had examined the animal when he was old and found on three of his legs undoubted physical evidence that they had at one time been broken. This appeared in a reputable publication, but when compared with some other facts in the history of the horse that are known, there can hardly be a doubt that the examination by the justice was a fiction. When I began to realize that the marvelous story was a mere fiction my “wrath waxed hot” against the people of “the land of steady habits,” to say nothing of “wooden nutmegs,” until Mr. O. W. Cook made it very plain that the people of Connecticut never had heard of the remarkable story. (See Wallace’s Monthly, Vol. VI., p. 251). Thus it became evident that the whole story had been fabricated in Maryland and was a kind of “green goods” method for catching the unwary. These are my apologies to the general public and especially to the Connecticut public for supposing them guilty of any such fraud. The naked truth of the matter is, that while this horse may have been imported from England, his public advertisements clearly indicate that his owners knew nothing of his blood or early history.
The colony of Rhode Island was planted by Roger Williams and his followers in 1636, and the first patent giving it a legal existence was obtained 1647. It was an offshoot from Massachusetts and a protest against the intolerance of that colony in religious affairs. For several years I made renewed and persistent efforts to discover whether in the early colonial period Rhode Island had ever imported any horses from foreign countries, and after exhausting every source of recorded information, I have not been able to find a single intimation of such importation. It is evident, therefore, that the famous Narragansett pacer is simply the result of carefully selecting and breeding from the best and the fastest of the descendants of the English pacers, to be found everywhere in the colony of Massachusetts. The superiority of the Narragansett pacer over all others of his kind seemed to suggest the probability that he must have possessed blood that was superior to all others, and to supply this “want,” a Rhode Islander advanced the claim that his grandfather had imported the original stock from Spain. Unfortunately for this “claim” there were two difficulties in the way of accepting it. First, there were no pacers in Spain, and second, the Narragansett pacers were famous for their speed and value before the grandfather was born, or at least before he was out of his swaddling clothes.
The horse interests of Rhode Island seem to have been active and successful from the very founding of the colony, and the fame of her pacers extended to all the American colonies at a very early day. When the authorities made their report to the Board of Trade at London, in 1690, showing what they had produced and where and how they had disposed of their surplus, they place horses at the head of their products and state that they are shipped to all the English colonies on the American coast. This statement is sustained by corresponding facts that are known in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Trading with the French colonies in Canada was rigorously prohibited, but it is quite probable that many a good pacing horse found his way to the St. Lawrence in exchange for pelts and furs. But, as the Narragansett and the pacer generally will be fully considered in another part of this volume, the reader is referred to the chapters wholly devoted to those topics.
That racing was a common amusement of the people of Rhode Island is fully established by the very best of contemporaneous evidence, and by the silver plate prizes won, that are said to be still in existence in some of the old families. Attempts have been made to laugh this statement out of court, on the grounds that Rhode Island was a Puritan colony, and such a thing as a horse race would not be tolerated for a single day. This attempt shows a great deal more smartness than knowledge, for Rhode Island was not a Puritan colony, as that term is generally understood, but had for its very foundation opposition to the spirit of intolerance that prevailed in all the other New England colonies. But, what is still more conclusive, the legislature of the colony in 1749 enacted a law prohibiting all racing, under a penalty of forfeiture of the horse and a fine of one hundred dollars. As in other colonies not in New England racing and betting had become so common that the moral sense of the people rose up and abolished it. If there had been no racing there would have been no law to wipe it out.
When the Rev. Dr. McSparran, of Rhode Island, made a trip in Virginia and rode the Virginia pacers some hundreds of miles, early in the last century, he seems to have observed them closely and spoke very highly of them, but he said they were not so large and strong as the Narragansetts, nor so easy and gliding in their action. It might be suggested that this opinion was the natural result of esteeming one’s own as better than those of a neighbor, but he was certainly right in the matter of size. In 1768 the Rhode Island horses averaged fourteen hands one inch, while the Virginia horses averaged (1750-52) thirteen hands one and three-quarter inches, making a difference of three and one-quarter inches in height. In the matter of gait they were not all natural pacers, for out of thirty-five there were eight that did not pace, and some of the others both paced and trotted. From this it may be inferred that breeders, in order to increase the size, had incorporated more or less of the blood of the early Dutch importations.
Chapter XI
COLONIAL HORSE HISTORY—PENNSYLVANIA, NEW JERSEY, MARYLAND, CAROLINA.
Penn’s arrival in 1682—Horse racing prohibited—Franklin’s newspaper—Conestoga horses—Sizes and gaits—Swedish origin—Acrelius’ statement. NEW JERSEY—Branding—Increase of size—Racing, Pacing, and Trotting restricted—MARYLAND—Racing and pacing restricted 1747—Stallions of under size to be shot. NORTH CAROLINA—First settlers refugees—SOUTH CAROLINA—Size and gait in 1744—Challenges—No running blood in the colony 1744—General view.
When William Penn arrived on this side of the water (1682) and took possession of his princely gift from Charles II., he found the eastern border of his new province already occupied, though sparsely, by an industrious and enterprising people. The old Swedish colonists as well as a sprinkling of Englishmen and other nationalities had been there for a good many years, and were beginning to get the necessaries as well as the comforts of life about them. For their numbers, they had a fair supply of horses, cattle, sheep, and swine; and the growing of cereals and fruits of all kinds showed encouraging progress, with the promise of plenty. The new proprietor was gladly welcomed and his rule proved kindly and beneficent. In a letter to Lord Ormonde, after his arrival, Mr. Penn, in describing the condition of things in his new colony, says: “The horses are not very handsome, but good.” The public affairs of Penn’s grant, before his arrival, had been administered in the name of the Duke of York, from about the time New Amsterdam had surrendered to the English, and hence we find sundry regulations with regard to the horse in force before that event.
The first of these, having the efficacy of law, was in the year 1676, requiring all horses to be branded, and officers appointed to do the branding and keep a record of the fact. Besides the individual brands, each town had its own brand that had to be applied, and by this double marking it was supposed that strays could be identified with certainty. Another provision was that no mares should be exported to Virginia or Barbadoes or other foreign plantations. Again, every owner was supposed to keep a certain number of horses at home, for daily use, and he was allowed to keep twice that number running at large. In 1682 no stone horse under thirteen and one-half hands high was allowed to run at large. This was afterward changed to thirteen hands. In 1724 this law was revised and re-enacted so that colts “of comely proportions” and not more than one year and a half old, if thirteen hands high, might run at large; but if older than eighteen months they must be fourteen hands high or suffer the penalty, which was castration. In 1750 horse racing of all kinds was prohibited, under a severe penalty.
In that grand old repository of ancient, curious, and valuable things relating to colonial affairs, the New York Historical Society, to which I am greatly indebted, I found a file of the Pennsylvania Gazette, commencing with the year 1729, published by “B. Franklin, printer.” In that day the term “editor” or “reporter” was not known in the vocabulary of any well-regulated newspaper office, and for anything of a local character you had to look in the advertising columns. To these I resorted, as usual, and they presented results that were a great surprise to me. Pennsylvania has long been famous for the production of great massive draft horses, and before the days of railroads just suited, with six or eight of them in a team, for the transportation of freights from the seaboard to the Ohio River. This was a great business at the beginning of this century and for forty or fifty years afterward. The fame of those great teams, the great wagons and the great loads they hauled over the mountains, spread far and wide, and as a special designation that went with them they were called Conestoga horses, and the wagons were called Conestoga wagons, named after a creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where many large horses were bred. There was no particular line of blood to be followed, for a large horse bred west of the mountains was just as certainly a Conestoga as though he had been bred in Lancaster County. The Conestoga was simply the horse that was best suited for a big team with an enormous load, and he varied in size from sixteen and one-half to eighteen hands in height and from one thousand six hundred to one thousand nine hundred pounds in weight. These measurements he reached by breeding for the one purpose of strength and weight. It is safe to conclude that in the latter part of the last century breeding animals of large size were brought over the water, for we can hardly conceive of their being descended from the little pacers preceding them only fifty or sixty years.
The Pennsylvania horses of the first half of the last century were remarkably uniform in size, and from a large number of cases in which the size is given I find the exact average was thirteen hands one and one-quarter inches. Of the twenty-eight animals in which the habit of action is given, twenty-four were pacers, three both paced and trotted, and just one is given as a natural trotter. Here we have two very striking facts—the low stature and the uniformity of the pacing gait. These horses average a quarter of an inch below the Virginians, the next lowest, and a higher ratio of pacers than in any other colony. There must have been some reason or reasons for this, and I will suggest two which strike me as probably effective in producing these results. The earliest settlers in Southeastern Pennsylvania were the Swedes. They brought their horses with them from the Old World, and they were undoubtedly pacers, but I have no means of determining anything about their size. This may be an important factor in determining the uniformity of the gait, as well as the diminutive size. The other consideration that I will present is the fact that the pacer was more fashionable in and about Philadelphia, then the leading city of the continent, than in any other section or portion of the colonies. It is a fact that seems to be fully established, that early in the last century the breeding of pacing horses was carried on in the region of Philadelphia, with much spirit and intelligence, and that pacing stallions for public service were carefully selected for their shapeliness and speed. It is also a fact that all horses that could not pace were, in the public estimation, classed as basely bred.
The Swedes and Finns planted a colony on the west bank of the Delaware in 1638, and as they were an industrious and thrifty people they prospered and extended their plantation up the river as far as Philadelphia. This territory was then claimed by the Dutch of New Netherlands, and they overcame the Swedes in 1655, and ten years later they in turn had to surrender to the English. Of the early Swedes, the Rev. Acrelius wrote and published, in the Swedish language, a very valuable account of his people. In speaking of their horses he says: “The horses are real ponies and are seldom over sixteen hands high [evidently a misprint and should read “thirteen” instead of “sixteen”]. He who has a good riding horse never employs him for draft; which is also the less necessary, as journeys are for the most part made on horseback. It must be the result of this, more than of any particular breed in the horses, that the country excels in fast horses, so that horse races are often made for very high stakes.” Such horses often sold for sixty dollars in our modern money. The question of the pacers of Philadelphia will be considered more at length in the chapters devoted to the history of the pacer.
NEW JERSEY is not known to have made any direct importations of horses from the old country. Lying between New York on the east and Pennsylvania on the west, she had abundant opportunity to get her supply of horses from her neighbors on either side, to say nothing of the overflow from Virginia about 1669. Like all the other colonies, as early as 1668 her horses were ordered to be branded and then suffered to roam at large and find their own living. Not much attention seems to have been given to the idea of improvement in the size and quality of the stock till 1731, when it was provided by law that all colts of eighteen months old, running at large and under fourteen hands high, should be gelded. I have not made any attempt to get at the exact average size of the Jersey horses, nor to ascertain the ratio of pacers among them, for we know the environments and the sources of supply, and in knowing these we know just what the Jersey horses were—a large majority of them were pacers and they were not over fourteen hands high.
The statutes of this colony, enacted 1748, furnished the first real evidence of record, with one exception, going to show that pacing and trotting races, as well as running races, were the common amusement of the people in the first half of the last century. They were so common, indeed, that the legislative authorities declared them a nuisance and restricted them to certain days in the year. That this was not a “moral spasm,” as some might call it, that had seized the legislative authorities of that particular year, is evident from the fact that, afterward and from time to time, this statute was amended, and always in the direction of greater restrictions and greater severity. This is sufficient evidence that the moral sense of the community sustained the lawmakers in pronouncing it a nuisance, to be abated. It is not probable that pacing and trotting races were any more common or more demoralizing in New Jersey than in some of the other colonies, but they seem to have been content with fulminating against “horse racing” without specifying the different gaits at which the horses might go in the race. Until this old colonial statute was discovered, it was not possible to prove by contemporaneous evidence that there had been any pacing or trotting races before the first decade of the present century. This, however, adds to their antiquity more than a hundred years.
MARYLAND was really the first in point of time to legislate for the suppression of pacing, as well as running races, but the old statute, enacted in 1747, was not discovered till very recently. This proves that pacing races were very common in Maryland one hundred and sixty years ago, but it says nothing about trotting races. It will be observed that in the New Jersey statute the different kinds of racing are placed in this order: “Racing, pacing and trotting,” and I take this to mean the order of their prominence. Applying this method to Maryland, it may be inferred that trotting races were infrequent and practically unknown, and hence not enumerated as offensive. Taking these two cases together, I think we are justified in concluding that the pacer antedated and preceded the trotter in all turf sports. No doubt he was faster then than the trotter, and he has maintained his superiority, in that respect at least, to this day. Maryland was a great racing colony and it was afterward a great racing State. This statute did not sweep over the whole colony, but applied only to the race course at Newmarket, and Anne Arundel and Talbot counties. As I understand the matter, this statute was enacted specially at the request of the Society of Friends, and for the protection of their yearly meetings.
With Pennsylvania on the one side and Virginia on the other, it is not necessary to spend any time on the sizes and gaits of the horses of Maryland, for they were simply duplicates of those in the two colonies with which they were in constant intercourse and trade. In the matter of undersized stallions running at large Maryland was more in earnest and more savage than any of the other colonies. For, by an act of Legislature, passed 1715, it was provided that any person finding an entire colt eighteen months old, or an unbroken stoned horse, running at large, no difference what his size, might shoot him upon the spot.
NORTH CAROLINA was first permanently settled by a colony from Virginia, led by Roger Green, July, 1653. For some years previous to this it had been the refuge of Quakers and others fleeing from the persecutions and proscriptions that prevailed in Virginia at that time, against all who did not conform to the ritual of the English church. These refugees and colonists took their horses and all they had with them, and as this was but a few years before there was an overproduction of horses in Virginia, and great droves were running wild without an owner, we may conclude they cost but little and that they spread rapidly in the new colony. As we thus know whence they came, we necessarily know what they were in size and gait, and we need not trace them any further.
SOUTH CAROLINA received her colonial charter in 1663, and the earliest newspaper that I have found was for the year 1744, from the advertisements in which I have extracted the following data as to size and gait. In the first four and the last four months of the South Carolina Gazette for 1744 I find thirty horses advertised as strayed or stolen, in which the size is given, and they average within a small fraction of an inch of thirteen and one-half hands, and of this number three are given as fifteen hands, which was considered, in that day, a large horse. Out of this number the gait is given in only twelve cases, ten of which were pacers, one paced and trotted, and one trotted only. The foundation horse stock of South Carolina was obtained chiefly, if not wholly, from Virginia, and the practice of branding and turning out, to roam at large, prevailed everywhere.
In the issues of the Gazette for this year (1744) I find but one advertisement of a stallion for public service, and he is called the “famous racing horse named Roger,” and is advertised as a great, race horse, but there is no attempt to give a pedigree or to claim that he possessed any blood that was not the inheritance of all others. Another advertisement is a lengthy challenge from Joseph Butler to run his gelding Chestnut against any horse, mare or gelding for five hundred or one thousand pounds “inch and weight,” the lowest horse carrying thirteen stone. No mention or reference is made to his blood, and from these two facts we may reasonably infer that at that time there were no strains of blood, known to the Carolinians, specially bred to run. The distance to be run is not definitely mentioned, but it was on a road from one point to another, and I suppose it was about two and a half, or possibly three miles. This was three years before the first English race horse was imported into Virginia. It has been represented that an old gentleman, whose name is forgotten, imported into South Carolina a number of English race horses at a period long anterior to this, but that claim has never been in a shape that placed it above very grave suspicion and doubt; and the claim accompanying it, in the way of apology, that the old man would never allow any of his horses to race, did not improve its credibility. From the advertisements just referred to, it seems evident that there was no distinctively English running blood in the colony till after this date.
This review of the horses of the colonial period embraces all that I have been able to glean of the character, qualifications, size and habit of action of the earliest importations and their descendants. Their diminutive size will be a surprise to my readers as it has been to me, and the overwhelming ratio of pacers to trotters will be a still greater surprise. The importance of increasing the size by judicious selections of the largest seems to have been ever present to the minds of the colonists, but not much could be accomplished in that direction, under the system prevalent everywhere of roaming at large. The little pacers were great saddle horses, and down to the days of good roads and wheeled vehicles they were deemed indispensable. That there were race horses among them at the running, pacing and trotting gaits there is indisputable evidence, covering about a hundred years of the colonial period, but there is no record of the rate of speed. The pacer was the favorite and fashionable horse of that period, and after something has been said about the Canadian horse we will take up his history and treat it with that fullness its importance demands.
XII. EARLY HORSE HISTORY—CANADA
Settlement and capture of Port Royal—Early plantations—First French horses brought over 1665—Possibly illicit trading—Sire of “Old Tippoo”—His history—“Scape Goat” and his descendants—Horses of the Maritime Provinces.
Before taking up the two provinces of the Dominion—Quebec and Ontario—to which reference is made in this volume as “Canada,” there is an incident in the history of Nova Scotia, full of sadness, that I cannot pass over without mention. The French made a settlement here in 1602, and named the country New France. The settlement to which I refer was at Port Royal, afterward named Annapolis by the English. This seems to have been a thrifty and flourishing little plantation, far removed from all outside associations, except the savages of the forests, with whom they lived in peace. The first horses brought to North America were owned and bred by the people of Port Royal. In November, 1613, Captain Argall, of Virginia, organized a plundering expedition, and having learned of the defenseless condition of Port Royal from Captain John Smith, he sailed up there with two or three ships, captured the place and carried away horses, cattle, sheep, wheat, farming utensils, and indeed everything their ships would carry, and then sailed away to Virginia. This raid was without authority or orders, but it was winked at by the officials, and forthwith a second raid was made by Argall, and all that had been left in the first was carried away in the second, as well as some of the inhabitants.
The pacer of Canada, generally believed to be of French origin, has long been an object of diligent investigation, without reaching any satisfactory results. Again and again I have gone over the first half-century of the history of the French plantations on the St. Lawrence; examining everything in the English language that held out any hope of throwing light upon the question, but nothing was revealed. The trouble was that my search stopped a little short of the date when the first horses arrived. The management of the affairs of the plantations on the St. Lawrence being in a company located in France, there was a lack of vigor, not much growth, and still less profits to the projectors of the colony. The energies of the people seemed to be directed almost wholly to collecting and trading in peltry instead of building up a commonwealth from the productions of the soil. For half a century these primitive people lived without horses. Their farms, if they could be called farms, all had a frontage on the water, running back in narrow strips to the highlands. They did their plowing with cattle and their canoes supplied the place of the saddle horse, the family carriage and the lumber wagon to carry the scanty surplus of their little farms to market. At last the company in France, holding direction and control, got out of the way, and the king of France assumed direct authority over the affairs of the plantation. On June 30, 1665, the Marquis de Tracy arrived at Quebec, as viceroy, with a numerous suite of retainers and a regiment of French soldiers. Two months later a large fleet arrived bringing many colonists, embracing artisans, farmers, peasants, etc., with their families, and a good number of horses, the first that had ever been seen on the St. Lawrence. There is a tradition that a horse had been sent over to the governor in 1642, but it is probable he was lost on the voyage, as the older people of the colony had no recollection or knowledge of any such animal. These colonists came from the ancient province of Picardy, not now to be found on the modern maps of France, but it lay on the English Channel in the extreme northwest of France. As it is expressly stated that these colonists came from Picardy, it is fair to conclude that the horses came from that portion of the kingdom also. At this period in history there had been no wars between France and England for many years, and commercial as well as social intercourse had long been cultivated between the people on both sides of the channel. We know but little of the early horse history of France, but in our own time we know that France has been largely benefited by the diffusion of the English blood among her horse stock, so we may conclude that if a man in Kent had a horse that a man in Picardy wanted, he very soon got him in the way of legitimate trade. I think, therefore, it is safe to conclude that the horse stock of Northwestern France and the horse stock of England were very much the same in appearance, action and blood. On this basis of reasoning, which involves no improbabilities, we may conclude that the same proportion of the horses from Picardy were natural pacers.
There is another theory, giving the Canadian pacer an Anglo-American origin, that commends itself to the unbiased judgment with even greater force than the one just suggested. Various writers have talked about the “French characteristics” of the Canadian pacer, and all that, when probably not one of them ever saw a horse that he knew to be French. The early pacers—the pacing-bred pacers—all have more or less strongly marked resemblances, especially in conformation, and it makes no difference whether they come from Canada or whether their habitat has been south of Mason and Dixon’s line for two hundred and fifty years. When we look at a pacer, therefore, we may as well be honest and say we don’t know whether he resembles the horses that reached the St. Lawrence in 1665, or those that reached Massachusetts Bay in 1629. The theory that the French Canadians got the foundation of their pacing stock from the New England colonies rests upon two well-known facts. First, the colonies had a great abundance of such horses for sale; and second, they were within reach of and purchasable by the Canadians. To these two facts rendering the theory possible, we have others which render it probable. The jealous restrictions sought to be imposed on both the English and French colonists by the home governments of both people strongly indicate that there was no small amount of illicit trading, and this trading, in the very nature of things, must have been between the English and French. Toward the close of the seventeenth century the English colonies, especially Rhode Island, had far more horses than they needed for home use, and they did a thriving business in exporting them to different parts. These were just the kind of horses the Canadians needed for their wild life in the wilderness; they were cheaper than they could be brought from France; the water way of Lake Champlain was convenient; pelts and furs were a desirable commodity of exchange, and there was no cordon of customs officers to keep the willing traders apart. Of these theories we consider the second the more probable of the two, and if we accept it we reach the conclusion that the so-called “French” Canadian pacer is merely a descendant of the old English pacer brought over by the early New England colonists. Objection has been presented to this theory, on the grounds that the powerful confederation of the Six Nations Indians interposed an insurmountable barrier to all trade, whether legitimate or illicit, between the Canadians and the colonists of New England. This objection is certainly conclusive as applied to the different periods of hostilities, but the hostilities were not continuous. During both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries there were periods of years at a stretch when there were no hostilities, and when there was nothing to prevent the Canadian and the Yankee from coming together and exchanging what they each had that the other wanted. The border abounds in traditions of the incidents connected with this illicit trading, but we need not go to the border in the wilderness to learn that the desire to “beat the customs” is almost universal. We can see it manifested every day at the docks in New York, when a steamer arrives from abroad. The fine lady, with her gloves and lots of other lingerie that she has been contriving all the way across how best to keep from the sight of the officer, is no better and no worse than the “Canuck,” who in a retired place at midnight trades his peltry to the Yankee for his horse. If the Canadian pacer did not have his origin in New England it was not because he could not be carried across the border.
When we enter upon the consideration of the actual performers descended from the original Canadian stock, we find both pacers and trotters of speed and merit, but in attempting to trace them to their particular ancestors we find ourselves in a labyrinth from which there seems to be no deliverance. In the midst of this darkness I am glad to be able to say there is a ray of light that illumines much that has been obscure. The greatest progenitor of trotters and pacers that Canada has produced, “Old Tippoo,” has been fully identified in his true origin, and he has been well named “The Messenger of Canada.” He seemed to be known all over Canada as the greatest of their trotting and pacing sires, and many attempts were made through several years to give his pedigree, but in all these attempts there were elements of weakness and in many of them very bald absurdities.
When the roan gelding Tacony made his record of 2:27, away back in 1853, the performance was looked upon as something that would not be surpassed in a generation at least. Then when Toronto Chief made his saddle record of 2:24½, ten or twelve years later, and it was found that he and Tacony were both descended from a Canadian horse called Tippoo, the inquiry became quite active as to what Tippoo was, and all kinds of imaginable stories were told about him. In the search for the history and breeding of the horse Tippoo, extending through more than twenty years, many curious and some impossible things were developed, and as these old “fads” may come as new discoveries in future generations, I will mention two or three of them here. The first of these untruthful statements to assume tangible form was to the effect that Tippoo was imported from England, and that he was got there by Nesthall’s Messenger. I never could tell how or where this story originated, but it first appeared in the pedigree given to Toronto Chief when he went into the stud on Long Island. This was settled by the facts, expressed in very few words, that the horse was not imported, but bred in Canada, and that there was no such horse in England as “Nesthall’s Messenger.”
The next representation came from an old horseman, Mr. V. Sheldon, of Canton, New York, a very intelligent and careful correspondent, who had given much labor to the question. He had learned from different sources, that were satisfactory to his mind, that a Mr. Howard, a traveling preacher, had ridden a mare from Lowville, New York, over into Canada; that this mare was in foal “by a very noted horse that stood at Lowville;” that when the mare became too heavy for his use under the saddle he sold her to Isaac Morden, and that the foal she dropped was the famous Tippoo. The name of the “very famous horse that stood at Lowville” was not remembered, but as Ogden’s Messenger was there at that time—1816-17—the conclusion followed that he was the horse. This representation was far from complete, but as there was nothing unreasonable about it, and nothing known to be untrue, I accepted it for a time, awaiting further light.
The third representation came from Mr. Lewis T. Leavens, of Bloomfield, Ontario, who was born 1792, and was, therefore, old enough to have had some personal knowledge of the horse. But whether his knowledge was personal or only traditional cannot now be made to appear. He says that Tippoo was got by a horse called Escape, and I will ask the reader to note this name “Escape” as we progress. He says that “when Escape was on the ocean, the vessel encountered a severe gale, and the horse had to be thrown overboard, and he was picked up the ninth day off the coast of Newfoundland, on a bar, eating rushes.” This silly and ridiculous story had been told and possibly believed by some fools more than a hundred years before the dates here implied by Mr. Leavens. It is probable it was first told as a joke, by some wag in Rhode Island, when asked about the origin of the Narragansett pacers. He replied that the original Narragansett “was caught swimming in mid-ocean, when a ship came along, lassoed him, pulled him on board, and landed him safely in Narragansett Bay.” The vitality of the joke probably had its origin in the experience of Rip Van Dam, when in 1711 he went up to Narragansett for a flying pacer, which is related in another part of this volume. Mr. Leavens speaks of the Rev. Erastus as the owner of the dam, and the breeder of the horse; but he says the horse did not come into possession of Isaac Morden till he was six or eight years old. The date of his death is fixed by Mr. Leavens in 1835, and while he is more definite than our information from other sources, all agree he died from a kick about that year.
The next representation that seems to be worthy of noticing is a communication that appeared in the New York Sportsman, written by somebody who signs himself “Dick.” Whether “Dick” is in earnest and believes what he writes, or whether he is merely trying to “sell” somebody, we will leave for him to decide. He seems to depend upon Mr. Morden, at one time the owner of the horse, as the source of his information. “Dick” says the sire of Tippoo was imported into New York in 1811, and was called Fleetwood. Why did he not tell us by whom the horse Fleetwood was imported? If there was a man in New York in 1811 so big a fool as to import an English stallion at great expense, and then send him up to the wilderness of Canada where there was neither money nor mares, his name should be handed down as a historical curiosity. The whole story is a “fake.”
In January, 1883, I received from the Hon. J. P. Wiser, of Prescott, Ontario, the following letter, which he had just received from the writer:
WELLINGTON, December 27, 1882.
As the origin of the Tippoo horses seems to be a mystery to you I will tell you. Erastus Howard was a traveling preacher in those days, and he traveled on horseback. He bought in Kingston a dark chestnut mare and bred her to a horse called “The Scape Goat,” brought from Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island. The horse was a large brown horse, and could rack (pace) faster than he could run. The colt was coal black and large, and was sold to Mr. Wilcox, who named him Tippoo Sultan. His gait was like the “Scape” some, but soon squared off to a trot, and the way he could go was dreadful. In June, 1836, he broke his leg and was lost.
WILSON SERLS.
This short letter was a great surprise, for never before had I heard of Mr. Serls. Through the kindness of Mr. Wiser he had entered the discussion, evidently without knowing anything about what representations had been made by others. His short, crisp sentences seemed to be an epitome of a history of this horse, which he might be able to give. It will be observed that the traveling preacher, Erastus Howard, is still in the foreground, and that Mr. Leavens’ “Escape” and Mr. Serls’ “Scape Goat” are evidently one and the same horse, and thus these two men practically confirm each other, so far as the identity of the horse is concerned. No time was lost in preparing a series of questions to be submitted to Mr. Serls, embracing the sources of his information, for although well advanced in years he certainly could not have had personal knowledge of what he testified. These questions not only covered the minute points in the history of the matter, but they were so framed as to test the accuracy and honesty of his memory. In due time they came back fully and satisfactorily answered, and as these answers embrace many things that my readers care nothing about I will condense them into narrative form.
Mr. Serls derived his information from his uncle, Stephen Niles, the brother of his mother. In 1798 Stephen Niles took a band of horses to Prince Edward County, and stopped with an uncle of his who was then a member of the provincial parliament, living on the Bay of Quinte. His uncle prevailed upon him to settle there. In 1800 he was married, and bought a farm of two hundred acres four miles west of Wellington, where he lived many years, and the place is still known as Niles’ Corners. He was an orthodox Quaker in his religious belief, and for a number of years he was one of the bench of magistrates for Prince Edward County. When the War of 1812 broke out he was employed by the British forces in procuring hay and grain for the mounted troops. In 1858 he died, leaving an honorable name behind him.
At the close of the war the military authorities sold off a large number of horses to the highest bidder, and Mr. Niles was present when the traveling preacher, Erastus Howard, bid off a dark chestnut mare for ninety-three dollars, at Kingston. This mare afterward became the dam of the famous Tippoo, and as a matter of course nothing can ever be known of her breeding. In 1816 a man from Rhode Island, whose name is not definitely remembered, but believed to be Williams, traveled the horse Scape Goat through Prince Edward County, and he stopped one day and night in each week at the house of Stephen Niles, and during that season Mr. Howard bred his chestnut mare to this horse, and, as already said, the produce was Tippoo. This black colt passed into the hands of Mr. Wilcox, who gave him his name, and he afterward passed through several other hands before he reached Mr. Morden about 1826, and he died ten years later from the effects of a kick. As the horse Scape Goat was brought from Narragansett Bay, and as he was a remarkably fast pacer, there can be no mistake in calling him a “Narragansett Pacer.” He was considerably larger than the average of that tribe, but this does not vitiate his title to a place in that family. It seems he was only kept in Prince Edward County the one season, and his owner, not being satisfied with the extent of his earnings, took him back to Rhode Island. Thus, the horse that has been proudly designated as “Canada’s Messenger,” was the son of a Narragansett pacer. In his younger days, Tippoo paced like his sire, but as he grew older the trotting gait was more fully developed.
It is safe to say that the immediate progeny of Tippoo were numerous, and it is safe to say that some of them, either as trotters or pacers, were fast for their day, but it must be confessed that we know very little about the way they were bred. One son was called Sportsman, but nothing is known of his dam and very little of the horse himself beyond the fact that he was the sire of the roan gelding Tacony, that trotted some great races about 1853, and made a record of 2:27. This horse had a son called Young Sportsman, that was more widely known as “the Sager Horse,” and his horse became the sire of the trotting mare Clara, or Crazy Jane, as she was at one time called, that made a record of 2:27 in 1867. Beyond these two representatives of the Sportsman line, I have not been able to go. It has been claimed that another son of Tippoo, called Wild Deer, was the sire of the Sager Horse, but it does not seem to be well sustained. There was a son called Wild Deer, and several others that have been mentioned by turf writers, but no particulars of any value have been given.
Warrior, or Black Warrior, as he is sometimes called, was a brown horse and not a black, as his latter name would imply. He was a son of old Tippoo and his dam was a black mare owned and ridden by an officer in an English regiment, known as the First Royals. She was a black mare and after she was sold out of the service she was called “Black Warrior,” and this name was transmitted to her son. This mare was for a long time represented as the dam of Royal George, but she was the dam of his sire. This horse was bred at Belleville, Ontario, and about 1840 a certain Mr. Johnston was moving from Belleville to Michigan. He had this horse with him, which, becoming lame on the way, he traded to a Mr. Barnes, living about twenty miles south of London, Ontario. He was a valuable horse and left many very useful animals. Many of his get were pacers, and he was kept by Mr. Barnes till he died.
Royal George was a brown-bay horse, foaled about 1842, and was got by Warrior, son of Tippoo. His dam was the off one of a pair of bay mares taken to that vicinity from Middlebury, Vermont, by a Mr. Billington. This mare got her foot in a log bridge and the injury made her a comparative cripple for life. Being thus unfitted for road work, Mr. Billington sold or traded her to Mr. Barnes. She was bred to Warrior and produced Royal George. It is said by those who knew both animals, that this mare was a better trotter than Warrior, and from this springs the argument that Royal George had a trotting inheritance from his dam as well as from his sire. To learn whence this inheritance came, I have labored assiduously for years without being able to technically determine it. The single fact that her sire in Vermont was known as “the Bristol Horse,” is beyond all doubt, but as Mr. Billington was not living when this search was commenced, it has not been possible to determine just what horse is meant by “Bristol Horse.” At one time Harris’ Hambletonian was known very widely as “Bristol Grey” or “Bristol Horse,” and this is the only horse in the records so designated. It may, therefore, be assumed as more than a probability that this was the sire of the dam of Royal George.
When three or four years old he was sold by Mr. Barnes to James Forshee, and he was known as “the Forshee Horse” for several years. He was sixteen hands high, not very handsome, but well formed, with plenty of substance and stamina, good action, and a first class “business” horse for anything that was wanted of him. In the stud, at low prices, he was largely patronized, and during the other months of the year he was employed in all kinds of drudgery. From Forshee he passed to Frank Munger, and from Munger to Mr. Doherty, of St. Catherines, for four hundred dollars, and he gave him the name of Royal George, and kept him many years. In 1858 W. H. Ashford, of Lewiston, New York, bought him and kept him two or three years there and at Buffalo. He seems to have passed into Doherty’s hands again, and died at St. Catherine’s, December, 1862. It is not known that he ever had any training as a trotter except what he got from his owner on the road, and there is no tradition of his ever having been in a race but once, and that was on the ice at Hamilton, about 1852, against the famous State of Maine, for a considerable wager. In this contest he was the winner. His highest rate of speed was about 2:50 under the saddle. He was strongly disposed to pace, but when he got down to his work his gait was a square, mechanical trot. He left a numerous progeny with a heavy sprinkling of pacers among them; they were generally of fine size and very useful animals. Many of his sons were kept entire and that whole region of Ontario was filled up with Royal Georges, to say nothing of the large numbers that were brought across the border. He left one representative in the 2:30 list, and five sons that became sires of performers.
Toronto Chief was the best son of Royal George, according to the records. He was a brown horse, foaled 1850, and was bred by George Larue, of Middlesex County, Ontario. His dam was a small bay mare by a horse called Blackwood, and his grandam was by Prospect. The horse Blackwood “was bought of a Frenchman below Montreal in 1837,” and that is all that can be said of his blood. He was a horse of fine size and went with great courage. Toronto Chief passed through several hands before he reached his owner, A. Bathgate, of New York. He was a horse of great speed for his day, having a record of 2:31 in harness and 2:24¼ under saddle. He left three representatives in the 2:30 list, and among them the famous Thomas Jefferson, 2:23, with thirty-nine heats to his credit. Six of his sons became sires of trotters, and five of his daughters producers. Like all the other minor families, the Royal George family is surely being absorbed or submerged in trotting strains of more positive and uniform prepotency.
It is probably true that Old Columbus and Old St. Lawrence were both descended from the Tippoo family, as they were both bred in Canada and seemed to possess and transmit the same characteristics as the Royal Georges possessed, in conformation and gait. Their descendants were not numerous, but so many of them were able to show such a rate of speed, either at the lateral or diagonal gait, that they left a distinct trace on the trotting stock of the United States. Old Pacing Pilot has always been classed as a Canadian, but no trace of his origin has ever been secured, and it is impossible at this day to give any definite information as to whether he was brought from Canada or not. Some forty or fifty years ago the “Canadian pacers” were so highly esteemed for their speed that very many horses were called “Canadians” that never saw Canada. The original Tom Hal was purchased in Philadelphia as early as 1828, and was always called a Canadian. He was the progenitor of the great pacing family still bearing his name, that is doubtless the most noted pacing family now in existence. Sam Hazzard, it is said, was brought from Canada about 1844, and left some noted descendants. Many others might be named, but as they never gained great celebrity, and as their origin is not fully established, I will leave the Canadians for future investigators.
The rich province of Ontario has always been, in all its ways, the most English section of the Canadian Confederation, and in nothing more than in horsemanship. True, it is now a great trotting region, but running is and always has been the sport of the rich and fashionable, and almost all the English horses imported in Canada have gone to Western Ontario. On the other hand, in the Maritime Provinces—New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island—running races have never been popular, except at Halifax, which is a great military station and socially and otherwise much influenced by its English army and navy residents. It is the only point in the provinces where running meetings are given or where the running horse is at all cherished. For generations the principal sport of the people of these provinces has been trotting and pacing races, winter and summer, for ice racing is very general and very popular, through Maritime as well as Western Canada, the numbers of great bays and wide rivers affording ample courses, everywhere, throughout the long winters. Though there is, through these provinces, a generous sprinkling of horses called French Canadian, it is a fact that when we write the horse history of Maine we have written that of the Maritime Canadian provinces. The best of the early trotting stock of these provinces came from Maine, and the most and the best of the old-time trotters of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island were of tribes loosely described as Maine Messengers. For this there are ample geographical and natural reasons. That part of Quebec nearest them has never been rich in horses nor in anything else which the Provincials want, or in which they trade. The people of eastern New England are their natural trading neighbors, and the city of St. John, New Brunswick, especially in the past, the common market place; and almost all the earlier Maritime trotting sires trace through St. John to Maine, or some of the other New England States. It is a fact, too, that for generations enterprising horsemen, in the lower provinces, have been importing American trotting stallions for service, and to-day the trotting stock of these provinces is very thoroughly Americanized. While the exportation of horses, principally to Boston and Bangor, is one of the industries of Nova Scotia and of Prince Edward Island especially, almost without exception trotting and pacing stallions in use there are imported American horses, or the descendants of American trotting sires; while, as we have noted, the foundation stock came chiefly from Maine, and in very small degree from Ontario or Quebec. In either of the Maritime provinces it is a rarity to find a trotting horse that has not more or less of American blood.
XIII. ANTIQUITY AND HISTORY OF THE PACING HORSE
The mechanism of the different gaits—The Elgin Marbles—Britain becomes a Roman province—Pacers in the time of the Romans—Bronze horses of Venice—Fitz Stephen, the Monk of Canterbury—Evidence of the Great Seals—What Blundeville says—What Gervaise Markham says—What the Duke of Newcastle says—The amble and the pace one and the same—At the close of Elizabeth’s reign—The Galloways and Hobbies—Extinction of the pacer—The original pacer probably from the North—Polydore Virgil’s evidence—Samuel Purchas’ evidence—The process of wiping out the pacer—King James set the fashion—All foreign horses called “Arabians”—The foreigners larger and handsomer—Good roads and wheeled vehicles dispensed with the pacer—Result of prompting Mr. Euren—Mr. Youatt’s blunder—Other English gentlemen not convinced there ever were any pacers.
In considering the antiquity and history of the pacing horse, it seems to be necessary that we should have a clear perception of the mechanism of the gait from which he takes his distinctive name and the relation which that mechanism bears to other gaits or means of progression. In the study of this mechanism we learn the combination by which we unlock the mystery that has puzzled so many breeders of the past and present generations. Some have maintained that the pace is a combination of the trot and the gallop, while a smaller number have maintained that the fast trot was a combination of the pace and the gallop. It is quite evident, as I will be able to show, that neither of these parties has ever given any careful attention and study to the mechanism of the different gaits. The most simple and least complicated method of illustrating this mechanism of movement is furnished in the human means of progression. At the walk, a man steps off with his left foot and the heel of that foot strikes the ground before the toe of the right foot leaves it. Then the right foot advances and strikes the ground before the toe of the left foot leaves it. This is the natural “heel and toe” walk, and the speed may be increased by quickening the step and extending the stride, so far as physical conformation will permit. Still greater speed becomes a succession of bounds, the propelling foot leaving the ground before the advanced foot strikes it. This is running, the highest rate of speed attainable, and in every revolution, for a space, the whole body is in the air. In the action of the horse, with four legs, we find greater complication, which I will try to make clear.
First, all horses walk, all horses pace or trot, and all horses gallop. The walk is easily analyzed, for it is slow and the movement of each limb can be followed by the eye. Each foot makes its own stroke upon the ground, and we count one, two, three, four in the revolution.
Second, at the gallop, which is a succession of leaps, each limb, as shown by the instantaneous photograph, performs its own function, whether in rising from the ground, flying through the air, or in striking the ground again. There is harmony in all, but there is no unity in any two or more of them, and when they strike the ground again you hear the impacts, one, two, three, four, in a cluster. The conventional drawing of the running horse in action is impossible in nature, and a wretched caricature of the action as it is. As in the walk, so in the run, we count four impacts in the revolution.
Third, at the pace the horse advances the two feet, on the same side, at the same time, and when they reach the ground again there is but one impact; then the two feet on the other side are advanced and strike in the same way. Thus, the rhythm of the action strikes the ear as that of the movement of an animal with two feet instead of four. In this there can be no mechanical mistake, for in the revolution of the four-legged pacing horse we count one, two, and in the revolution of the two-legged man we count one, two. The conclusion, therefore, seems to be inevitable that the two legs on the same side of the pacing horse act in perfect unison in performing the functions of one leg. At the trot the horse advances the two diagonal feet at the same time, and when they reach the ground again there is but one impact; then the two other diagonal feet are advanced and strike in the same way. Thus, the rhythm of the action strikes the ear as that of the movement of an animal with two feet instead of four. In this there can be no mechanical mistake, for in the revolution of the four-legged trotting horse we count one, two, and in the revolution of the two-legged man we count one, two. The conclusion, therefore, seems to be inevitable that the two diagonal legs of the trotting horse act in perfect unison in performing the function of one leg. In the mechanism of the gait then that is midway between the walk and the gallop there is no difference in results, nor distinction in the economy of motion, except that the pacer uses the lateral legs as one, and the trotter the diagonal legs as one. In use, there is a vertical distinction, if that term should be allowed, between the gait of the pacer and the trotter. The action of the pacer is lower and more gliding which fits him for the saddle, while the action of the trotter is higher and more bounding which makes him more desirable as a harness horse. In the processes of inter-breeding to the fastest, this distinction, if it be a distinction, seems to be coming less real, or at least less observable.
While the essential oneness of the pace and the trot is indicated above from the mechanism and unity of the two gaits, there is a great mountain of evidence to be developed when we reach the consideration of breeding subjects, in which we will meet multitudes of fast trotters getting fast pacers, and fast pacers getting fast trotters; fast pacers changed over to fast trotters and fast trotters changed over to fast pacers, and the final evidence that speed at the one gait means speed at the other. Having briefly explained what a pacer is, it is now in order to take up the question of whence he came.
On the summit of the Acropolis, in Athens, stand the ruins of the Parthenon, a magnificent temple erected to the goddess Minerva. The building was commenced in the year B.C. 437, and was completed five years afterward. All the statuary was the work of the famous Phidias and his scholars, made from Pentelic marble. This noted building resisted all the ravages of time, and had, in turn, been converted into a Christian temple and a Turkish mosque. In 1676 it was still entire, but in 1687 Athens was besieged by the Venetians, and the Parthenon was hopelessly wrecked. As a ruin it became the prey of the Turks and all other devastators, and in order to save something of what remained of its precious works of art, Lord Elgin, about the year 1800, brought home to England some portions of the frieze of the temple, with other works of Phidias, in marble, sold them to the government, and they are preserved in the British Museum. This frieze is a most interesting subject to study, not only as a specimen of Greek art of the period of Pericles, but as a historic record of the type and action of the Greek horses of that day. It consists of a series of white marble slabs, something over four feet wide, upon which are sculptured, in high relief, the heroes and defenders of Athens, mounted on horses, and some of these horses are pacing, while others are trotting and cantering. This is the first undoubted record we have of the pacer, and it is now over two thousand three hundred and thirty years old.
Britain became a Roman province in the reign of Claudius, in the first part of the first century of the Christian era, and it continued under the Roman yoke until A.D. 426, when the troops were withdrawn to help Valentinian against the Huns, and never returned. When Julius Cæsar first invaded Britain, in the year B.C. 55, he found the inhabitants fierce and warlike and abundantly supplied with horses and war chariots. These chariots were driven with great daring and skill, and the fact was thus demonstrated that this kind of warfare was not a new thing to the Britons, and that they were not to be easily subdued. The next year he returned again, but the second seems to have been no more successful than the first expedition. But little is known of the extent of territory overrun or the result of these invasions beyond the fact that no settlement was made then, and none till about ninety years afterward, when under the reign of Claudius, a strong military colony was planted there and Britain became a Roman province. During these centuries of bondage we know practically nothing of the lives of the slaves and but little of their masters, except the remnants of military works for aggression and defence, and the magnificent roads they constructed where-ever they moved their armies. In relation to their horses, I will make a few extracts from a work published about the beginning of this century, by Mr. John Lawrence, a man of great research and intelligence, besides of a wide acquaintance with the practical affairs of the horse, and, I may add, altogether the most reliable writer of his period. He says:
“In forming the paces, if the colt was not naturally of a proud and lofty action, like the Spanish or Persian horses, wooden rollers and weights were bound to their pastern joints, which gave them the habit of lifting up their feet. This method, also, was practiced in teaching them the ambulatura, or amble (pace), perhaps universally the common traveling pace of the Romans.
“That natural and most excellent pace, the trot, seems to have been very little prized or attended to by the ancients, and was, indeed, by the Romans held in a kind of contempt, or aversion, as is demonstrated by the terms which served to describe it. A trotting horse was called by them succussator, or shaker, and sometimes cruciator, or tormentor, which bad terms, it may be presumed, were applied specially to those which in these days we dignify with the expressive appellation of ‘bone-setters.’”
The statuary of the early ages furnishes some excellent illustrations of the gait of the horse at that period of the world’s history. The four bronze horses on St. Mark’s in Venice are known throughout the world, and they are in the pacing attitude. The forefoot that is advanced is possibly a little too much elevated to strike the ground the same instant the hinder foot should strike it, but the whole action indicated is undoubtedly the lateral action. The date of these horses is lost in history, but it is supposed they were cast in Rome, about the beginning of the Christian era. Their capture in Rome and transfer to Constantinople, then their capture by the Venetians and transfer to Venice, next their capture by Napoleon and transfer to Paris, and then their restoration to Venice, are all matters of history.
William Stephanides, or Fitz Stephen, as he was called, a monk of Canterbury, was born in London, lived in the reigns of King Stephen, Henry II., and Richard I., and died 1191. He wrote a description of London in Latin, which was afterward translated by John Strype, and printed, from which I take the following extract:
“There is without one of the gates, immediately in the suburb, a certain smooth field (Smithfield) in name and reality. There every Friday, unless it be one of the more solemn festivals, is a noted show of well-bred horses exposed for sale. The earls, barons and knights who are at the time resident in the city, as well as most of the citizens, flock thither either to look or to buy. It is pleasant to see the nags with their sleek and shining coats, smoothly ambling (pacing) along, raising and setting down, as it were, their feet on either side; in one part (of the field) are horses better adapted to the esquires; those whose pace is rougher, yet expeditious, lift up and set down, as it were, the two opposite fore and hind feet (trotting) together.”
After locating and describing the pacers in one part of the field and the trotters in another, Fitz Stephen goes on to take a look at the colts, then horses of burden, “strong and stout of limb,” and then their chargers in their galloping action. He next gives a very spirited description of the race, when the people raise a shout and all the other horses, cattle, etc., are cleared away, that the contestants may have an unobstructed field. It is a fact worthy of note that every English writer on the race horse, for the past century or two, has quoted a part of the above paragraph from Fitz Stephen as the first known and recorded instance of racing in England, but left one of the most important parts out. Even Mr. Whyte, one of the most prominent of modern writers, in his “History of the British Turf,” seems to have followed some other writer, in the omission; or possibly, as he never had seen a pacer in England, he concluded that Fitz Stephen had only imagined that he saw, in one part of the field, horses moving at the lateral gait. In the paragraph quoted above, I have italicised that part of the description which English writers on turf subjects have omitted with remarkable uniformity.
This seems to have been the period in which the pacing horse reached the highest point in official and popular appreciation, at least since the days of the Roman occupation of Britain. In speaking of this period, Mr. Lawrence says: “All descriptions of saddle horses were taught to amble” (that did not amble naturally), “and that most excellent and useful gait, the trot, was almost entirely disused.” In addition to the evidence of Fitz Stephen, we have that furnished by the Great Seals of a succession of sovereigns commencing with Richard I., and continuing to Elizabeth. These seals represent a knight in armor, mounted on a pacing horse in action, and perhaps the most conspicuous, at least the clearest, impression that has come down to us is that of King John, used at Runnymede, when he yielded to the demands of his barons and granted the Magna Charta. This act secured the liberties of the Anglo-Saxon race for all time and in all climes.
Mr. Thomas Blundeville was, probably, the first writer on the horse who undertook to publish a book in the English language on that subject. This book, entitled “The Art of Riding,” was merely a translation from the Italian, with some brief observations on English horses added to it. The first edition, it is said, was published in London, 1558, the year that Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne. The only edition which I have been able to find in the British Museum is that of 1580, in old English black letter. In quoting from the old authors of that period I will seek to avoid confusion by using the modern orthography. In speaking of the horses of his day he says:
“Some men would have a breed of great trotting horses meet for the war and to serve in the field. Some others again would have a breed of ambling horses of a mean stature for to journey and travel by the way. Some, again, would have a race of swift runners to run for wagers or to gallop the buck, or to serve for such like exercise for pleasure. But the plain countryman would have a breed only for draft or burthen.
“The Irish Hobbie is a pretty fine horse, having a good head and a body indifferently well proportioned, saving that many of them be slender and pin-buttocked. They are tender-mouthed, nimble, pleasant and apt to be taught, and for the most part they be amblers and thus very meet for the saddle and to travel by the way. Yea, and the Irishmen, both with darts and light spears, do use to skirmish with them in the field, and many of them do prove to that use very well, by means they be so light and swift.
“Let those mares that shall be put to the stallion be of a high stature, strongly made, large and fair, and have a trotting pace as the mares of Flanders and some of our own mares be. For it is not meet, for divers reasons, that horses of [service stallions] should amble. But if any man seeks to have a race of ambling horses, to travel by the way, then I would wish his stallion to be a fair jennet of Spain, or at least a bastard jennet, or else a fair Irish ambling Hobbie; and the mare to be also a bastard jennet, bred here within this realm, having an ambling pace, or else some other of our ambling mares, so that the mare be well proportioned. And if any man desires to have swift runners let him choose a horse of Barbary or a Turk to be his stallion, and let the mare, which shall be put unto him, be like of stature and making unto him, so nigh as may be, for most commonly, such sire and dam such colt.”
It is evident Mr. Blundeville was not much of a friend of the pacer, but as an honest writer he considers things as he finds them. Unfortunately he throws no light upon just what he means by the term “Spanish Jennet,” and a definition of that term, as used in the sixteenth century, would throw much light on passages from following writers in later periods. Everybody knows he was a small Spanish saddle horse, but nobody knows just what gait he took. To use Blundevilles own language, “The pace of the jennet of Spain is neither trot nor amble, but a comely kind of going like the Turke.”
Mr. Gervaise Markham published several revised and enlarged editions of his work on the horse, the last of which I have been able to examine being printed in London, 1607, the same year the colony was planted at Jamestown, Virginia. In this edition he devotes nine short chapters or paragraphs to the pacer. In quoting from him I will again use the modern methods of spelling. He says:
“First to speak of ambling in general. It is that smooth and easy pace which the labor and industry of an ingenious brain hath found out to relieve the aged, sick, impotent and diseased persons, to make women undertake journeying and so by their community to grace society; to make great men try the ease of travel, more willing to thrust themselves into the offices of the commonwealth, and to do the poor both relief and service. It makes them when necessity, or as the proverb is, “when the devil drives,” not to be vexed with the two torments, a troubled mind and a tormented body. To conclude, ambling was found out for the general ease of the whole world, as long as there is either pleasure, commerce or trade amongst the people. Now for the manner of the motion and the difference betwixt it and trotting. It cannot be described more plainly than I have set down in my former treatise; which is that it is the taking up of both legs together upon one side and so carrying them smoothly along to set them down upon the ground even together, and in that motion he must lift and wind up his fore foot somewhat high from the ground, but his hinder foot he must no more than take from the ground, as it were, sweep it close to the earth. Now, by taking up both his legs together on one side, I mean he must take up his right fore foot and his right hinder foot. For, as in the contrary pace, when a horse trots he takes up his feet crosswise, as the left hinder foot and the right fore foot, etc.”
Mr. Markham, in his edition of 1607, then goes on in six or eight chapters acknowledging that many foals pace naturally, and to show how the foal may be trained to pace. His methods are very cruel, in many cases, and very crude throughout; but it clearly demonstrates the fact that in the sixteenth century the pace was a very general gait among English horses. In these chapters we find the toe weight first introduced as well as the trammels or hopples. The most striking fact brought out in these chapters is the discovery that more than three hundred years ago Englishmen were using the same devices to convert trotters into pacers that we are now using to convert pacers into trotters. He takes notice that Mr. Blundeville had advised those who wished to breed amblers to select a Spanish jennet or an Irish Hobbie, and objects to the former on the grounds that their paces are weak and uncertain. From this I conclude that the gait of the jennet, whatever it might have been, was not a habit of action fixed in the breed, and that its transmission was doubtful.
Mr. Markham then goes on further to explain the mechanism of the trot and the pace and incidentally introduces the rack or single-foot action, which, I think, is the first time I have found it in any English writer. He says:
“The nearer a horse taketh his limbs from the ground, the opener and evener and the shorter he treadeth, the better will be his pace, and the contrary declares much imperfection. If you buy a horse for pleasure the amble is the best, in which you observe that he moves both his legs on one side together neat with complete deliberation, for if he treads too short he is apt to stumble, if too large to cut and if shuffling or rowling he does it slovenly, and besides rids no ground. If your horse be designed for hunting, a racking pace is most expedient, which little differs from the amble, only is more active and nimble, whereby the horse observes due motion, but you must not force him too eagerly, lest being in confusion he lose all knowledge of what you design him to, and so handle his legs confusedly. The gallop is requisite for race horses.... If he gallop round and raise his fore legs he is then said to gallop strongly, but not capable of much speed, and is fitter for the war than racing.”
In 1667 the Duke of Newcastle published his famous work on the horse under the title, “A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses, and Work them According to Nature and also To Perfect Nature by the Subtilty of Art which was Never Found Out, but by the Thrice Noble, High, and Puissant Prince, William Cavendish, Duke, Marquess, and Earl of Newcastle, etc., etc.,” followed with twelve other titles and offices. The book was dedicated to “His Most Sacred Majesty, Charles the Second,” and is pretentious and magniloquent in its letter press and its make-up as it is in its title. In this work there is a great deal of bad English, some sense, and much nonsense, all mixed up with a strut of superiority that His Grace, no doubt, felt justified in enjoying after his long years of beggary in Antwerp. In giving the natural gaits of the horse he places the walk first, then the trot and next the amble, which he describes very minutely as follows:
“For an amble he removes both his legs of a side, as, for example, take the far side, he removes his fore leg and his hinder leg at one time, whilst the other two legs of the near side stand still; and when those legs are on the ground, which he first removed, at the same time they are upon the ground the other side, which is the nearer side, removes fore leg and hinder leg on that side, and the other legs of the far side stand still. Thus an amble removes both his legs of a side and every remove changes sides; two of a side in the air and two upon the ground at the same time. And this is a perfect amble.”
The duke seems to have been somewhat profuse in the use of words, and not very happy in his use of them, but after all we know just what he means. The description of the movement is that of the clean-cut pace, and our object in introducing it here is not only to show that the pace was then a well-known and natural gait in England, but also to show that the pace and the amble are one. In itself, the word “amble” is a better word than “pace,” for the latter is often used in referring to a rate of speed without regard to the particular gait taken by the horse, but in this country it is now universally understood to apply to the lateral motion, and it would not be wise at this day to attempt to change it. There is an undefined supposition in the mind of some people that the amble is something different from the pace, that it is a slower and less pronounced gait, and hence we are often told a given horse did not pace, but “he ambled off.” In all that we have found in the writings of the past, and in all that I have seen with my own eyes, I have not been able to discover that there is any distinction between the amble and the pace. The only distinction is not in the gait itself, but in the fact that our ancestors, four hundred years ago, used the word “amble” to express precisely the same thing that their descendants now express by the word “pace.” The only sense in which the word “amble” is used among the horsemen of this country is to describe a kind of slow, incipient pace that many horses, both runners and trotters, show when recalled for a fresh start in scoring for a race. This probably indicates, whether in the case of a runner or a trotter, that somewhere, not very far removed, there is a pacing inheritance, and this incipient amble, as it is sometimes called, comes from that inheritance. It is also possible that it may arise from the excitement of the start and the confusion consequent upon the contest.
At the close of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, about the beginning of the seventeenth century, the pacing horse of England was at the highest point of his utility and fame. He was the horse for the race course, he was the horse for the hunting field, and he was the horse for the saddle. He was able to beat King James’ Arabian, and with the few Barbs that had then been brought in, the historian informs us, he was able to hold his own. There were two tribes of his congeners, the Galloway and the Irish Hobbie, the former from Southwestern Scotland and the north of England, and the latter from Ireland. These tribes were chiefly pacers, and not a few of them were distinguished as running horses. The Bald Galloway, as he was called, was a grand representative of his tribe. He was simply a native pony with a bald face, and he was a capital runner for his day, and a number of his get were distinguished runners. True, he is tricked out in the Stud Book with a pedigree, wholly fictitious, and that nobody ever heard of for a hundred years after he was foaled, but that did not prevent his daughter Roxana, when bred to Godolphin Arabian, from producing two of his greatest sons, Lath and Cade. This topic, however, has already been considered in the chapter on the English Race Horse. The Galloways were very famous as pacers in their day, and it seems they were about the last remnants of the pacing tribes to be found in England. It seems, also, that long after they had ceased to be known on the other side their descendants were still known by the same designation in Virginia. From the history of the times, it appears that a wealthy Irish gentleman invested quite largely in shipping live stock to Virginia, and there can hardly be a doubt that his shipments included some of the Irish Hobbies.
While the opening of the seventeenth century witnessed the supremacy of the English pacer, in the uses and enjoyments of the lives of the people, during the whole course of its succeeding years he was battling for his existence, and at its close he was nearly extinct. At the close of Queen Anne’s reign there were still a few Galloways left, but in the early Georges there were no longer any survivors, and Great Britain was without a pacer in the whole realm. The extinction of a race of horses that had been the delight of the kings, queens, nobility, and gentry of a great nation for many centuries is, perhaps, without a precedent in the history of any civilized people, and the causes which produced this wonderful result are well worthy of careful study. In looking into these causes we must consider the facts as we find them.
As we have no guide, either historic, linguistic or ethnographic, by which we can certainly determine the blood of the original inhabitants of the British Isles, it is not remarkable that we should be in profound ignorance as to the blood of their horses. They were, doubtless, like their masters, of mixed origin, and through all the centuries their appearance would indicate that they have been bred and reared in a nomadic or semi-wild state, in which only the toughest and fleetest had survived. A good many years ago I met with a theory, advanced by somebody, that the original horse stock of Britain came from the North, but there were no reasons given to support it. I have no hesitation in accepting this theory, as far as it distinguishes between the North and the South, for some Northern countries produce vast numbers of natural pacers, as Russia, for instance, but I have never learned that any Southern country produced pacers. Certainly the shaft horse of the Russian drosky has been a flying pacer for generations, and great numbers of them are produced in Russia, especially in the eastern part of the empire. As these pacers are produced in a natural and semi-wild state, it must be conceded that habits of action have been inherited from their ancestors in the remote past. Historically, we know that the Phœnicians, when they ruled the trade of the world, supplied the whole of the northern coast of Africa, from Egypt to Algiers, and the southern coast of Spain, with horses, about a thousand years before the Christian era. Now, the horses of those regions are the descendants of the original stock carried there by the Phœnicians, and we know their habit of action is not that of the pacer. Hence the conclusion that the English pacer came from the North and not from the South. In speaking of the difference in the gaits of Northern and Southern horses, Mr. John Lawrence specifies the horses of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., and says: “They are round made, but with clean heads and limbs; their best pace is the trot (or pace), which indeed is the characteristic pace of the Northern, as the gallop is of the Southern horse.” Other writers speak of the trot (or pace) as common to Northern horses, but as not common to Southern horses. Now, as all Southern horses do trot, and as these writers could not fail to know that they trotted, at some rate of speed, we must construe their terms so as to be consistent with plain, common sense. There was something in the “trot” of the Northern horse altogether different from the “trot” of the Southern horse that rendered his habit of action more conspicuous, probably by his higher rate of speed, but still more probably by the peculiar mechanism of his lateral action. If we insert the word “pace” instead of the word “trot,” the meaning of these old writers becomes very plain and in harmony with other known facts. Neither does it militate against the theory that the inhabitants of Britain may have secured their original horse stock from the Phœnician merchants; but if they did, it seems quite evident that at a later date they supplemented their supply from the pacing element from the North.
At the close of the fifteenth century Polydore Virgil, an Italian ecclesiastic, came to England and wrote a descriptive history of the British Islands in Latin, which was published about 1509. Part of this history was very clumsily translated about the time the English language began to assume its present form in literature and learning. In speaking of the horses of the country, he seems to have been greatly surprised with the pacers, and treats them as a curiosity. He says: “A great company of their horses do not trot, but amble, and yet neither trotters nor amblers are strongest, as strength is not always incident to that which is most gentle or less courageous.” It will be observed that these observations were made nearly four hundred years ago, and that the surprise of the Italian was not at merely seeing a few pacers which he had never seen in his own country, but that “the great company” of English horses were pacers. As I have here given an instance showing the surprise of an Italian at finding pacers, I will follow it with another showing the surprise of an Englishman at not finding any pacers. The chaplain of the Earl of Cumberland, on his several voyages of discovery in South America and the West India Islands, about 1596, made elaborate note of what he saw and learned of the new countries which the English then visited for the first time. These notes passed into the hands of that wonderfully prolific writer, or rather compiler, Samuel Purchas, from whose fourth volume, page 1171, the following paragraph is taken:
“And I wot not how that kind of beast [speaking of cattle] hath specially a liking to these Southerly parts of the world above their horses, none of which I have seen by much so tall and goodly as ordinarily they are in England; they were well made and well mettled, and good store there are of them, but methinks there are many things wanting in them which are ordinary in our English light horses. They are all trotters, nor do I remember that I have seen above one ambler, and that was a little fiddling nag. But it may be if there were better breeders they would have better and more useful increase, yet they are good enough for hackneys, to which use only almost they are employed.”
The surprise of the Englishman at finding no pacers in South America seems to have been as great as that of the Italian at finding so many of them in England, one hundred years earlier. These horses were strictly Spanish, and probably were descended from those brought from Palos in 1493 by Columbus, the first horses that ever crossed the Atlantic. The “one little fiddling nag” that showed some kind of a pacing gait may have been of English blood and captured from some English expedition, several of which were unfortunate; or his failure to trot may have been the result of an injury. It should not be forgotten that in that period every sea captain was out for what he could capture, and this was especially the case as between the English and the Spanish. These are the outlines of the principal points of evidence that the pacing habit of action came from the North and not from the South. That there were pacers in both Greece and Rome before the Christian era, and perhaps later, there can be no doubt, for they were both overrun and devastated again and again by the hordes of Northern Barbarians, bringing their flocks and their herds and their families, as well as their horses, with them.
This question naturally suggests itself here: “If the English pacer had been the popular favorite of the English people for so many centuries, how did it come that he and his habit of action had been so completely wiped out in one century, the seventeenth?” This question might be answered in very few words, by saying the people thought they were getting something better to put in his place. In reaching this conclusion I will not pretend to say the judgment of the people was not right, that is, if they exercised any judgment in the case. “Jamie the Scotsman” when on the throne set the fashion in the direction of foreign blood by paying the enormous price of five hundred pounds for the Markham Arabian. The Duke of Newcastle, when he was young, had personally seen this horse, and while he thought he was a true Arabian, he described him as a very ordinary horse in his size and form, and an entire failure as a race horse. It seems that any average native pacer could outrun him, but he carried the badge of royalty, and that was sufficient to make him fashionable, as he was not only the king’s horse, but was himself a royal Arabian. The weak place in the character of James I., in addition to his intolerable pedantry, was his inordinate ambition to be considered the wisest sovereign who ever sat upon a throne since the days of Solomon. His courtiers, nobility, and all who approached him understood his weakness, and a little quiet praise of the great superiority of the Arabian blood in the horse, over all other breeds and varieties, was always grateful to the monarch, for he was the original discoverer and patentee of that blood. Then and there, in order to praise the wisdom of a foolish king, a foolish fashion grew into a foolish notion that has afflicted all England from that day to this. No humbug of either ancient or modern times has had so long a run and so wide a range as the miserable fallacy “that all excellence in the horse comes from the Arabian.” Notwithstanding the thousand tests that have been made and the thousand failures that have invariably followed, from the time of King James to the present day, there are still men writing books and magazine articles on the assumption that “all excellence in the horse comes from the Arabian,” without ever having devoted an honest hour to the study of the question as to whether this is a truth or a fallacy. This craze for Arabian blood was the primary cause of the extinction of the pacer, and this craze was so strong in its influence that when a foreign horse was brought in, no difference from what country, if he were of the lighter type he was called an Arabian and so advertised in order to secure the patronage of breeders. Horses brought from the African coast were invariably classed as Arabians, notwithstanding they and their ancestors were in Africa more than a thousand years before there were any horses in Arabia; and the same may be said of Spain. But as this line of inquiry has already been considered in another chapter, I will get back to the immediate topic.
The process of breeding out the pacer did not commence in real earnest until the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Stuarts regained the sovereignty of Great Britain in the person of Charles II. Released from the restraints of Puritan rule, the Restoration brought with it a carnival of immorality and vice, for the court and the courtiers set the fashion and the people followed. As the breeding interest of the period of which we now speak has already been considered in the chapter on the English Race Horse, I will not further enlarge upon it. The light, or running and hunting, horses of England of that day were not all pacers, but they were all of the same type and the same blood, hence when I speak of the pacers I include their congeners. They were small—less than fourteen hands high—and not generally handsome and attractive. In general utility they were ahead of the importations, and doubtless many of them could run as fast and as far as the foreign horses, but the foreigners had the advantage in size, especially the Turks and the Neapolitans; besides this, they were more uniformly handsome and attractive in their form and carriage. It is also probable that the outcross from the strangers to invigorate the stock was needed and resulted in the increase of the size of the progeny. This latter suggestion is inferential and has been sustained by many similar experiences, but without this as a start it would be exceedingly difficult to account for the rapid increase in the height of the English race horse. It is certainly true that the chief aim of the English breeder of that day was to increase the size, without losing symmetry and style, and if he found that foreign upon native blood gave him a start in that direction, he was wise in the commingling. Another consideration, growing out of the rural economy of the people, doubtless had a very wide influence in the direction of wiping out the pacer, in this period of transition. Long journeys in the saddle became less frequent, good roads began to appear and vehicles on wheels took the place of the saddler and the pack horse. To get greater weight and strength for this service, recourse was had to crosses with the larger and courser breeds, and through these channels have come the giants and the pigmies of the modern race course. Under the changed conditions of travel and transportation it is not remarkable that the people should have been willing to see their long-time favorites disappear, for it is known to every man of experience that the pace is not a desirable gait for harness work. No doubt the pacer is as strong as the trotter of the same size and make-up, but in his smooth, gliding motion there is a suggestion of weakness communicated to his driver that is never suggested by the bold, bounding trotter. The antagonism between the pacers and the new horses of Saracenic origin was irreconcilable and one or the other had to yield. As the management of the contest was in the hands of the master the result could be easily foreseen, for if one cross failed, another followed and then another, till the Saracenic blood was completely dominant in eliminating the lateral and implanting the diagonal action in its stead.
As no home-bred pacer, of any type or breed, has been seen in England for nearly two hundred years, it is not remarkable that Englishmen of good average intelligence, for the past two or three generations, have lived and died supposing they knew all about horses, and yet did not know there had ever been such a thing in England as a breed of pacing horses. When, some eighteen or twenty years ago, I called the attention of Mr. H. F. Euren, compiler of the Hackney Stud Book, to the early English pacers as a most inviting field in which to look for the origin of the “Norfolk Trotters,” he was surprised to learn that such horses had existed in England, but he went to work and gathered up many important facts that appear in the first volume of the Hackney compilation. Many of these facts, but in less detail, had already appeared, from time to time, in Wallace’s Monthly, but Mr. Euren’s was the first modern English publication to place them before English readers. From this prompting, Mr. Euren did well, but we must go back a little to see how this subject was treated by English writers of horse books, who wrote without any promptings from this side.
Mr. William Youatt was a voluminous writer on domestic animals, and at one time was looked upon as the highest authority on the horse, both in England and in this country. He seems to have been a practitioner of veterinary surgery, and from the number of volumes which he published successfully, he must have been a man of ability and education. There can be no question that he knew a great deal—quite too much to know anything well. The first edition of his work on the horse was published in 1831, and soon after its appearance several publishing houses in this country seized upon it as very valuable, and each one of them soon had an edition of it before the public. It purports to have been written at the instance of “The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.” This declaration was a good thing, in a commercial view, and no doubt it did much in extending the circulation of the book. Without tarrying to note several minor historical blunders, I will go direct to one relating to the gait of the horse, which is now under consideration. In his fourth edition, page 535, he incidentally discusses the mechanism of the pace, and after speaking of the Elgin Marbles, to which I have referred at the beginning of this chapter, and after conceding that two of the four horses are not galloping but pacing, he says:
“Whether this was then the mode of trotting or not, it is certain that it is never seen to occur in nature in the present day; and, indeed, it appears quite inconsistent with the necessary balancing of the body, and was, therefore, more probably an error of the artist.”
This remark is simply amazing in an author who pretentiously undertakes to instruct his countrymen in the history of the horse when he knows nothing about that history. If he had gone back only twenty-two years, “Old John Lawrence,” in his splendid quarto, would have told him about the pacer. If he had gone back one hundred and sixty years, the Duke of Newcastle would have explained to him the complete and perfect mechanism of the pacing gait. If he had gone still further back and examined Gervaise Markham, Blundeville, Polydore Virgil, and Fitz Stephen the Monk, of the twelfth century, any and all of them would have explained to him the pacing habit of action and shown him that for many successive centuries the pacing horse was the popular and fashionable horse of the realm. If Mr. Youatt had lived to see John R. Gentry pace a mile in 2:00½; Robert J. in 2:01½, and dozens of others in less than 2:10, he might have changed his mind and concluded that it was possible, after all, for a horse to travel at the lateral gait without toppling over. From Mr. Youatt and a few other modern English authors, most of our American writers on the horse have derived what little mental pabulum they thought they needed, and thus an error at the fountain has been carried into all the ramifications of our horse literature. Only two or three years ago a very intelligent gentleman, who had attained great eminence as a veterinary surgeon, especially for his knowledge and treatment of the horse’s foot, seriously and in good faith stoutly maintained that the pacing habit of action was merely the result of an abnormal condition of the foot, and that all pacers would trot just as soon as their feet were put in the right shape. We must not laugh at this wild notion, for it is really no worse than Mr. Youatt’s doubting whether it was possible for a horse to balance himself at the lateral motion. Neither gentleman seemed to know anything about the fact that it was a matter of inheritance, and that the lateral habit of action had come down by transmission through all the generations for a period of more than two thousand years. It is hardly necessary to say that the gentleman who was so confident that the pace was merely the result of the abnormal condition of the feet brought his notions about the pacer from across the water. He was an Anglo-American, and could make a pacer into a trotter in a jiffy, by using the paring-knife. He was an intelligent man and a skillful veterinarian, but there were no pacers in England and there should be none here. Toward the close of the chapter on The Colonial Horses of Virginia, will be found the observations of an English tourist in 1795-96 who is very certain that there is some mistake about the pacer, and will not be convinced there are any, unless they are artificially created. Having now completed what I had to say about the old English pacer, it is next in order to consider his descendants in this country and the relations they bear to the American trotter.